Strike zone

[buckweat]

Originally Posted by BlueLawyer

Most of us are in agreement, although anybody who says any two umpires have the same zone hasn't seen them work. Hell, I sometimes don't have the same zone night to night- even at the same level.

I have been working hard to get my zone consistent from game to game- with the caveat that it should be appropriate to the level of ball I'm working. It's complicated by the fact that I might work 13 yo BR- (they go from 60 to 90 foot bases here- way too big a jump in my opinion) and then go work AAA Legion the next night with 4 or 5 JUCO kids on the field.

The only way to train your eye to the strike zone, IMHO, is to strap it on and get behind the plate for live pitching. The limitation of camps that use pitching machines for cage work is that every pitch is virtually the same, and always a strike. Don't get me wrong- the cage work is valuable for mechanics, timing, stance, etc., but not for finding the pitch at the hollow of the knee of a 5'5" kid for a strike.

Strikes and outs!

This is off subject, but I’m curious about something.

Being an SK, I have the same problem all the time when flipping from one level to the next, or from flipping from games governed by one rule set to another. There are just enough subtle little differences to make my life miserable if I try to do the best job possible.

What I almost always end up doing is scoring the game as though it was under OBR, but adjusting it for what “ordinary play” was. But before I turn in any numbers, I almost always have to go look in a rule book to make sure that those rules coincide with what I turn in.

Goofy things like there being “team errors”, or OBP using all sacs to compute OBP under NFHS, while not under other rule sets. There’s other things out there that are definitely different, just as with differences for the ump in going from venue to venue.

I “try” to always have the “books” for what games I’m scoring in the brief case, but that doesn’t happen all the time. From the umps I’ve been around, most are pretty candid in that they don’t usually have a “library” they carry around with them, but generally try to do much the same thing I do.

They go by OBR, or whatever they call the most, then don’t worry about it all that much. If there’s something that gets protested, it will be ironed out by whoever adjudicates the protests. For other things that happen during the game, like “pop up” slides for NCAA, they count on their partners to help them out, or will even actually hear out a coach, unless he gets to be an a******.

Do you find jumping around bites you on the backside very often? I know the umpire’s assn we used this year for JUCO would send us guys who were calling JUCO, D1, local semi-pro, HS, softball, slo-pitch, Mickey Mantle, Legion, BR, LL’s Big League, and tournament ball of all levels. Plus, we even got a few early games called by guys who did games for the local A and AA teams.

I imagine it gets pretty overwhelming at times, and wondered how much you concerned yourself with it. The thing I got a kick out of was that most of the umps said most of the lower level coaches didn’t know enough about he rules to be a big problem, but those old farts who’ve been coaching teams at the same level for 20-30 years could drive ya nuts sometimes.