Illlegal Pitch Effect

["Lurker"77]

Coaching in a scholastic sub-varsity situation (and often in other developmental situations), I never minded truly good officials who took every measure they could to take pity on new and under-educated coaches. I'm on this board, but I rarely wanted to see my team excessively score and dominate the game because the adult on the other side didn't know or hadn't educated their students on proper rules and procedures. It doesn't teach anything to my well-prepared team and doesn't help the other students either.

I think that Ernie's situation of two entire JV teams (please say there were no fans and only a solo coach with each team!) not understanding that a batter-runner is required to go to first base qualifies as a situation where a good umpire may want to stretch mechanics to help a clueless coach (two of them!). It's hard to see in this case how either coach could truly object to a using this as a teachable moment rather than just continuing to wait it out (which it sounds like it already had been a while).

At the JV level with very rough players/coaches early in the season, sometimes preventative-officiating-type conversations take place beyond the bounds where they typically should (dead balls, etc.) in order to get the student-athletes and raw coaches trained properly for later and higher levels, no?