[REFANDUMP]

There's a major issue which I haven't seen addressed here. For sake of simplicity, let's assume the organization you normally umpire for is ABC. Is this tournament sanctioned by organization DEF or is it totally unsanctioned ?? If it's sanctioned by organization DEF, why wouldn't you have just paid the fees and umpired ??? If it's totally unsanctioned, I can understand your concerns about working, however I would have still worked after giving my word to the assignor. I also would have however, made sure the assignors superiors were made known that he was assigning games for unsanctioned tournaments. I don't think this would have gone over well for the superiors in organization ABC.

If you're not willing to apologize, I would start checking to see if there are any youth baseball organizations that need umpires, or be willing to jump in your car to work softball games. You don't have any other options that I see.