Earrings and a ponytail.

[SanDiegoSteve]

Originally Posted by JRutledge

Do not get me wrong, there are certainly some hot spots in this country where baseball is taken very seriously and I am sure the umpires have to have a higher standard.

You would be hard pressed to find an area of the country who takes baseball any more seriously than they do where I live, and anywhere in the SoCal region. It's more of a religion out here, worshipped nearly year-round, when most parts of the country are in hiebernation already. We take our baseball as seriously as Texas takes their HS football. And that, brother, is very seriously indeed.

And the point is, the umpire I'm talking about didn't just "happen" to get D-1 assignments. Back in the day, being a D-1 umpire was really not that big of a deal, and nobody cared what an umpire looked like. That is a more recent phenomenon. Now it's all about how purty the umpire looks, not whether or not he can umpire a friggin' tiddlywinks contest, which is how I equate many of the D-1 umpires I've seen lately. He was assigned good games because he was a good umpire all around, and was well respected by coaches and administrators everywhere.