Slowpitch "mechanics"?

[mcrowder]

Originally Posted by Stat-Man

Examples included touching his shoulder (imagine trying to call a 20 second time out in basketball)

That's the local yokel signal for "Deep" (another word you won't find in the rulebook). Someone's not been to a clinic at all, I see.

I filled in at a slowpitch tourney recently. It was quickly obvious that there were about 5-6 REAL umpires there (who had been to clinics, work HS and/or ASA fastpitch, or took their slowpitch seriously) and the other 20 guys were ex-players who thought they knew what to do and wouldn't listen to anything from anyone. It was technically an ASA tourney, but probably only because that was the ruleset they randomly picked. Only those 5-6 real umpires had any real ASA gear (shirts, hats). I had ONE plate conference the whole tourney (the championship - a very well worked game), and was actually told by a partner (this same partner parked himself in A about 80% of the time and never moved) that I should be signalling "Deep" on high pitches. When I mentioned that this was not a proper mechanic, and that there was no such thing as deep, he said we should talk about it with the UIC afterward.

Willing to humor him, we did just that, at which point the UIC told me I was wrong.

Last time I'll work for that guy.