Dangerous, Deadly Dangerous

[greymule]

That's the kind of rule that's so unusual a coach might actually remember it.

I coached high school baseball 35 years ago and ignorantly assumed that baseball rules were baseball rules, that OBR covered everything. I think many umps did also. For all I know, in those days that was true. Schools contracted directly with umpires, not with an association. Maybe in 1970 there wasn't a Fed in NJ.

When I umpired Fed many years later, I found very few coaches who knew, for example, the force play interference rule. Most (certainly not all) assumed that slides at 2B were treated just as in OBR and were amazed when I informed them differently.

Once in the early 1970s I stopped to watch a girls' varsity softball game simply to watch a little of it, but when the ump(s) didn't show up, one of the coaches (a former baseball teammate) asked me to officiate. So I did, with no rules knowledge except what I knew from playing a little softball myself. Imagine that happening today. Thirty years later, I did a game at the same school, and everything was far more "official."