Admit I am out of touch,

[SanDiegoSteve]

Originally Posted by Rich Ives

Sometimes I think too many of the participants here spend too much time watching the umpires and not enough watching the game and how it gets played.

I disagree with this statement. I think most of the participants here have either been playing or coaching the game, most of them quite extensively, their whole lives prior to and while being an umpire, and know how the game is played. For example, I wrote a 19 page term paper in college in 1983 on the Art of Pitching, just to name one scholarly baseball assignment that I did back then (Physical Education major, Coaching emphasis), which was 3 years before becoming an umpire.