Sooooooo....today was the first day...

[ctblu40]

WWTB-
To answer your question, no I've never been offered a contract by PBUC. I've never been to one of the schools (I would like to go just to learn though). I've never considered trying to make umpiring a career. It's certainly not a feesable line of work for someone with a family, travel more than pay playing a part in that.
I was offered to be a replacement by my college assignor, but declined for various reasons. First was the fact that my younger brother is (was, he resigned with the ratification of the curren contract) a professional umpire, second is that I have friends that are professional umpires, and lastly, because I am a member of organized labor and believe in supporting other organizatios.

I'm an associate member of the AMLU, and visit their website daily, and I have never seen these stories of amature woes that are posted. Maybe you could send me a link to one of these. The postings of amature woes that I've seen all occured while amatures were filling in as replacements. They were also mostly (95%) newspaper articles posted by the mother of one of the striking umpires.

Now for the "good job" that amatures were doing as replacements. I work with at least 7 of the replacements in my area doing NCAA and below and I can tell you that although they are good umpires, they are nowhere near the quality of every professional I've ever seen. Keep in mind that prior to the start of the season, MLB sent a memo to all of the farm directors and staff members in MiLB and specifically requested that they be "patient with and respectful of" the replacements. If the amatures were expected to do just fine, then why the need for such a memo?

I'm not posting here to bash the job the replacements did, I probably couldn't do much better. My real beef is that many upper echelon amatures think as if they are just as good as the professionals. This is simply not true. Every umpire, amature and professional, at any level needs to realize that there is always room for improvement. What caught my attention here was the initial sarcastic tone in the first posting in this thread. It seems as though this individual is hoping for the failure of others to validate his own abilities. To me this is a sign of some sort of inferiority complex.