Umpire evaluations

[mbyron]

Inexperienced evaluators seem to think that criticism is intrinsically negative. Remember that when you become experienced enough that somebody asked you to evaluate a newer umpire.

Evaluation is more challenging than you might think, due to how pattern recognition works: it's easy to spot deviations from a pattern, even when describing the pattern correctly is not easy. For example, you know where the furniture in your home is, right? Could you describe the exact position of every piece of furniture? Probably not, but you'd recognize instantly if someone moved something even an inch.

In the meantime, it sounds as if you're listening carefully to areas where you need to improve. Eventually, they'll become fewer: during a recent informal evaluation of my performance on the basketball court, one of our association's harshest critics could come up with only "your pants are too tight." I figured that I'd had a pretty good game... (and bought some new pants).