BEST article I've read

[Carl Childress]

Originally posted by Tim C
The article is just the restatement of ideas discussed here for the last five seasons.

It is simply written in ratspeak for the uneducated to be able to understand.

Tee

Tee: C'mon, you're better than that.

First, Rich is a Little League coach so you shouldn't be commenting, right? You don't recognize that as baseball, right?

Second, Mr. Ives is -- like everybody who coaches Youth ball -- BY DEFINITION not a rat.

He is not a professional, paid to do a job. He's certainly not in the league with MLB skippers. And instead of getting $40,000 a year (like a high school coach in Texas), he's out of pocket several thousand dollars a year.

It's just wrong for you and others (names supplied on request) to lump Rich Ives together with Lou Piniella, Larry Bowa, and others of that ilk.

If Peter Osborne's taught us one thing over the years, it's that coaches ain't stupid.

For a long time I thought the repeated references of amateur umpires to coaches/managers as "rats" was a joke, something they said to feel solidarity with the umpires who made it to "The Show." I comforted myself by thinking that nobody really believes that.

Imagine my surprise when I finally realized, courtesy of Internet message boards like this one, that those amateur umpires were serious!

Thank goodness, I've never actually known someone with such little respect for the people who begin the process of teaching those players we watch on TV and at Yankee Stadium.