Slowpitch "mechanics"?
 

The other night, a friend invited me to his team's slow pitch game, since I know about half his team and he said I should come see them play some time. After finally finding the right diamond (doh!), I watched the remainder of the game.

On some of the pitches that were balls, the umpire would make what I thought were odd gestures. Examples included touching his shoulder (imagine trying to call a 20 second time out in basketball), or pushing his right hand away from the plate.

Are those official slow pitch mechanics or just a personal thing? Personally, I'd just as soon balls be called "Ball" without a pantomime act. :p

(For what it's worth, I believe the league uses ASA rules)

Sounds like an umpire who hasn't been to enough clinics to me. Those are not official ASA hand signals, even though you see a lot of umpires use them. Just a contagious bad habit, is all, and I'll admit that for a long time, I was guilty of the same.

any double fist pumps?:eek:

Read my mind ;)

Mine too.

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.

And that would have been the point where I directed him to page 226 of the Umpire Manual.

"The umpire is not an announcer or broadcaster on the field. Let the people broadcasting the game describe the pitches as "a little inside" or "just outside", "ball deep", etc. All the umpire should say is "ball" or "strike". Describing the the pitch is a cop out for an umpire. If a player wants to know where the pitch was, they will ask, and then you can tell them."

Plural pronounds aside (they and them)...can it be any more clear than that?

If it's not, flip to the guidelines on page 224.

"Do not verbally describe a pitch or use a hand signal to indicate the location of a pitch"

I've only worked about two dozen slow pitch games in my life, but I've played in or watched more than I can count.

In this area the verbal commentary and hand signals to describe location are rampant. Yes, even the dreaded "double-fist pump"!

I see no need to go into a rant about proper mechanics....that ground has been covered.

Nope, of course I wasn't looking for them either. If I ever go to another SP game, I promise to look for them. :D

You call that a rant? I thought it was a calmly worded, level-headed, fact-based reply.

Maybe it's been covered before, but it is apparent that the person who started this thread must not have seen that previous discussion.

So...should we ignore him?

Holy cow- what topic hasn't been covered at one point or another on these boards? From foul tips to illegal pitches to uniforms to proper mechanics, if we limit our discussions only to subjects that have never been addressed before you're not going to see too many posts!

Now that was a rant! :D

[RANT ON]How are we to recognize a rant if you don't use the universal HTML language?[RANT OFF]

I believe Darrell was not (as opposed to wasnot) referencing any post, but making a statement that we (board members) need to get into another ginormous thread concerning mechanics.

Well, I'm safe on this (not only because I don't call slow pitch). I have the main proponent of goofy mechanics on my ignore list. I highly recommend it.

Yes, but remember you can not (as opposed to cannot) assume much of anything here in the fairly impersonal world of WWW communication.

Well...you can assume ignorance fairly easily at times...:D

But if you do that, then we will all have to quote him just so you can keep up with all the cutting edge, good ol boy mechanics.:D