The Biggest Irritant in your history of umpiring

[zm1283]

Originally Posted by biggravy

I have a couple irritants:

Love how good umpiring where I'm at is not recognized or rewarded. Guys that look sharp, know the rules, and hustle on every play no matter the score are lucky to get games unless they know someone. A guy who wears black tennis shoes and a backwards hat behind the plate gets to chief the postseason regional. We do 2 man all year them switch to 3 for postseason. Guys who have zero frickin clue how to do three ump routinely get these games and make ZERO attempt to have a clue what they are doing. Last year in a regional final had a very round, very out of shape, very lazy ump on 3B who absolutely would not bust it into the working zone on clean base hits, no runners. We had to do the game w/ U1 in B for runners on 1B only b/c U3 would not do his job. No amount of convincing would get him off his keister. It got real awesome when w/ R1 R3 on a fly to left 1 out he actually stood right next to the runner at third and lined him up, screened out PU who had swung toward 3B dugout to line it up and when the defensive coach in 3B dugout saw the kid leave early appealed and wanted U3 to make the call. Nope. U3 says "that's the plate's call." Plate says "uhh you were standing right in my way". Coach is screaming at U3 that he was "right there". U3 says "nope, not my call". It was great. And all that is normal and acceptable here. I guess stuff like that is my biggest irritant.

This seems to be the case in a lot of places.

[billken]

Originally Posted by zm1283

This seems to be the case in a lot of places.

I worked a playoff last night with one of these guys that likely gets games because he's been doing it for 30 years. I bet he called 20 strikes before they hit the glove. With a 4 man crew, he didn't check any check swings...3 of which were obvious swings to everyone in the park. And with a good catcher and a very heavily recruited pitcher, he flinched or bailed out on about 15 curveballs...most of which were strikes.

He missed em for both teams, so it all worked out. But it was disappointing to know that there were a lot of good umpires sitting at home who could have done a much better job.