Speed of softball pitch

[prekowski]

Originally Posted by SNIPERBBB

Ship your guys here, id love to have them. Our guys here wont enforce the 6 ft minimum. Balls that barely reach the waist are called legal an alarming amount of time. The mat is the most evil device ever to be instituted. The only time they are to be used is if you have to pull clueless people out of the stands to umpire.

I cant possibly know how accurate your guys are at determining the lower limit (6 ft). What I can tell you is, that from a batters perspective, when you have a 6 ft pitch, about 97 out of a 100 batters will complain that pitch is too low. And those 3 out of a hundred who say no it is not too low are probably pitchers who have put in the time to determine how high a 6 ft pitch actually is. When I was practice pitching, I took two string lines on either side of the plate and ran them from the 6 ft height at pitchers rubber and tied it to the backstop so the lines when very taught were close to 6 ft between plate and rubber (plus or minus an inch) and demonstrated it to many guys and they were astounded at how low a pitch really was that was just above the string.

With regard to mat versus strike zone, be careful what you ask for. If you have guys that are bad calling mat ball when all you leave to judgment by the ump is one dimension (the vertical dimension i.e. height) and you put them calling strike zone where they have to make a judgment in 3 dimensions (vertical, horizontal and depth) then you are going to have a nightmare. That is the good thing about mat ball, it gives the batter much more ability to determine what is going to be called a strike because in the one area of judgment, the batter is told verbally by the ump if it is illegal, while the pitch is in flight, and the other two dimensions are cut and dry as it is either going to hit the mat or it isn't.
I am the first to admit umpires are human and subject to mistake just like everybody else and their judgment is not always going to be right (remember I was an ump too and know that as well as anybody) but when you have umpires that get paid to do their job, and they don't make the effort to try and improve their ability to judge by practice, and continue to make the same mistakes over and over, then they are deserving of criticism.
To some umpires, at least the ones I have experienced, their attitude is "my word is the law, even if I am not so good at interpreting the law and if you don't like my interpretation of the law", they will yell "QUIT RESISTING" as they beat you into submission.