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I started in high school baseball about 16 years ago and their umpire manual says to make a "ball" call from the set position, make a "strike" call by standing up to give the verbal and visual signal together.
It took me some time to get the hang of doing it "the softball way" when I started in softball a few years later!
But, yeah, some of the guys I've seen in the LL tournament seem to take forever to call the pitch. Good timing is one thing, but they seem to be taking an artificially long amount of time, probably in an exaggerated effort to demonstrate their "good timing".
There's a brief pause you can take to make sure you get a good look at the pitch all the way into the mitt so you're not calling the pitch too soon, and then there's a long pause that really is too long and it makes you look like you're unsure about your call. Some of these guys need to find the happy medium in between those two.
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