Player lodged in fence

[BretMan]

I actually had this happen in one of my games.

Wild pitch, F2 runs back toward the backstop and does a slide to retreive the ball. He slid into the backstop and his foot went under the chainlink fence. He was caught fast by his foot and his shin guard, literally lodged in the fence.

I left the ball live as a runner from second base crossed the plate. No complaints from the defensive coach.

After the game, a spectator stops me on the way to the parking lot. He informs me that "he's an umpire" and that I blew it by not killing the ball on that play. I asked him, "By what rule would the ball become dead?".

"The ball was lodged", he says. I told him the ball wasn't lodged, the player was.

"But you should have called time for safety reasons", he says. I said that, from my viewpoint, the player wasn't injured, or in any immediate danger of becoming injured.

The guy then drops the name of our local assigner, saying, "I wonder what Mister XXXX would think of that?".

So I said, "I don't know, why don't you ask him. He knows who I am and if he has a problem with what I did he can contact me personally".

Funny, but I never did hear anything more about it...