....help warm up pitchers between innings, and get another 15% raise! :D

'tradition' aside, my general objection would be that I have enough to do already without taking on the coaches' and scorer's jobs also. Do you appreciate and seek out opportunities to do 3-4 other peoples' jobs in additional to your own at your place of employment?

I would say my 'employers' at the field deserve my best umpiring effort and concentration on matters that ONLY I can do (rules, game management, playing conditions, strikes/balls, etc). That can be degraded by these other distractions, esp if I have to invent methods to track them :eyeroll:

I am suprised at the massive response to a simple situation. Umpires need to keep track of strikes, outs and certainly your balls. Umpires should not care about minimum play details.

Why should you be surprised? This a little league site now. That's what little league sites do. They endlessly debate stupid little league rules that don't mean sh!t.

No, what little league sites do now is complain constantly that little league umpires are posting on them, or that little league umpires exist, or that they care about little league rules.

This thread has had contributions from 7 small-ball contributors (including 2 coaches) and 11 Real Umpires(tm). I count about 64 individual messages, 23 from the small-ballers. Of these, 4 were actually a discussion about the actual rule question. The rest were driven in another direction by the Real Umpires(tm).

Since that discussion actually drove off the OP before his question was answered, it's possible that the real small-ball discussion would have gone an a little longer, but if the goal is to keep these conversations short, you'd expect different behavior from the Real Umpires(tm). I will not presume to question what actual goal would motivate the behavior we do see on little league boards from the Real Umpires(tm).

For my part, I've tried (until now) merely to clear up misstatements and answer questions about actual Little League practice. I assumed, since the questions came from Real Umpires(tm), that I was helping.

-LL