Baseball vs Softball Umpiring

[Strike3UROUT]

You are exactly right that you have to love what you are doing to do a great job. I try very hard to give the pitchers only 5 pitches between innings but this is not the only thing that slows the game down. Since there are a lot of small schools around where I work there are a lot of walks, errors and stolen bases. Seems like a lot of kids go to "hitting coaches" but NOBODY works on their defense. I've seen so many routine double play grounders butchered up it isn't even funny.

Another factor of making baseball games lasy forever is when the batter steps out of the box between every pitch. A lot of players have a habit of taking 5-6 steps up the line to take the sign and then of course by the time they take 5-6 steps back and get adjusted it's one pitch and they are going to do it all over again. I had a couple of games last year when I told the coaches in the pre-game that the batters HAD to keep one foot in the box at all times instead of walking around getting the signs. When they started doing this I made sure the pitcher didn't "quick pitch" them but indeed waited for them to get ready. I found it to work quite well and it really reduced the time of the game.