Throwing the Bat - LL

[MD Longhorn]

Originally Posted by kylejt

Easy now, fellas. WP is in agreement with the procedure of benching the kid, instead of the EJ. There's just no current mechanism for it.

OK, fair enough if true. How do we know they are in agreement with it, considering they did not put it in the rulebook, and have likely had numerous opportunities to do so.

So what's the beef with dumping the manager who tries to roll you? Would it be better to just eject the player instead, which in most people's opinion, is way too harsh? So the umpire is trying to be nice, and keep the kid from having to stay home for the next game, and the manager tries to take advantage of it? Well gents, that's pretty unsportsmanlike.

I great you that I don't work LL (well, until last night!). I can't think if an instance in my other rulesets that I do consistently work where I would need to or want to tap-dance around the rules like this. But it seems to me that once the umpire has decided to "be nice" and not enforce a particular rule, he can't really call it unsportsmanlike if the manager takes advantage of that niceness.

If the next guy wants to play that game, I guess that kid wasn't actually sick/injured/benched after all. He was ejected.

I can't even imagine the S-Storm if this sort of thing happened and I wanted to retroactively eject someone for something that happened 2 innings ago. (At least ... in any other rule-set). I know for fact that my assignor would be so far down my throat I'd be choking on feet.

It's 9 year olds. Ejecting an 9 year old for stuff like this will sour his baseball experience, and that of his folks. No need for it.

Honestly, I agree with this in principle. So why wouldn't WP, if they agreed, simply fix the rules so that umpires are not in this bizarre semi-rule-enforcing potentially-retroactive-ejecting netherland in this particular situation?