ARRRRGG!!! Umpires!!!

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I have a lot of friends within the softball community. Some of them are umpires. The umpires that I consider as a friend work very hard at being an umpire, in every aspect. For those umpires that work hqard at staying current in thier trade, I have the utmost respect. But something happened at a tournament this weekend that I cannot excuse. For those umpires that do work very hard at your trade, please read along and I'll bet that you might blow a gasket also.

This event centered around the very basic substitution rule. Here is a breakdown of what we did:

Player A starts the game. In the 3rd inning, player B enters the game, replacing Player A in the batting order. When Player B comes to bat 2 innings later, Player A now re-enters to bat for Player B. When that half-inning is over, the coach re-enters Player B, taking Player A out of the game. Player A is now done for the duration of the game.

Well, the umpire tells the coach that he cannot re-enter Player B because since she did not start the game, she does not have a re-entry. Since the coach had ask me to confirm the rule before we got to this point in the game, I now enter the discussion because I feel responsible and explain to the umpire the ASA rule concerning substitutions. The umpire confers with his other crew member and they return with the same ruling as before. Now I am starting to get riled. After explaining the rule, again, and our substitution steps in great detail and even suggesting that he go ask the other coach if what we were doing was legal, he still refuses to budge from his ruling. The UIC is summoned. We explained what we were trying to do and he agreed with the game umpires. I told him that he was wrong. Of course, he looked at me with a "how dare you tell me I am wrong" leer and said that "No, he was right and I was wrong" and we got a lot of attitude from him. Well, I'm not going to stand for that so I then explain to him that the rule that he and the game crew are wrong about was changed about 4 or 5 years ago to allow each girl on the roster 1 re-entry. I then get the "deer in the headlights look". I was really getting quite flustered at this point. I thought that I was a goner. But, I wasn't going down without a good argument, because, by golly, I was right as rain. I didn't get the ol' heave ho but I'll bet I was close. I wasn't belligerent but I wasn't backing down. I think my blood pressure medicine was working overtime at this point.

After we explained the rule about 3 more times, the UIC then leaves to talk to the TD. The opposing coach comes over and verifies what we are trying to do with the substitutions (excellent move on his part). He concurs that we are legal and tells the game umpiring crew that he has no problem with what we are trying to do. The plate umpire then re-starts the game. The UIC shows up after that half-inning, tells the plate umpire that we were correct but the UIC never comes to us to apologize for the attitude and the incorrect ruling.

How can the Local ASA Commissioner allow umpires like this to continue umpiring, or even be designated a UIC? They had no knowledge of the basic rules. I can maybe excuse a game umpire for having a brain cramp but I cannot excuse the UIC. He has a book that he can look up the rule for Pete's sake. This tournament was no little tournament. It was a big ASA event in which lots of teams, from Ohio and outside of Ohio, could be in attendance. I would think that the ASA would want to put their best people on this job. Teams are paying umpires $35 a game. This tournament had a 2 hour slot for each game. That works out to approximately $17.50 an hour. This is well above minimum wage. At these rates, I expect someone to know their job.

So, how do we solve this problem??? Here is a possible solution. Before each tournament, each umpire and UIC has to take, and pass, a written test on basic rules knowledge. If they do not pass the test, then they cannot work.

But wait......There's more!!! To be fair, I have heard many coaches spouting misinterpreted rules at tournaments or even making up rules. So, every coach must also take the test. If the coach fails the test, the coach cannot coach at that tournament.

Now if we can get a way to test the parents;&


Well, maybe both coaches and umpires can do a lot more self-studying.

 

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No excuse for an umpire not knowing the rules.

 

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Same coach got busted for subbing and not reporting in the next game.

 

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I have one word for you, Bill:

PROTEST

This is a clear misinterpretation of a playing rule and 100% protestable. These are exactly the kind of things that the official protest procedures are designed to handle. It might take a couple of points off your blood pressure readings if you just utter the magic words, "I want to file a protest".

Without going into all the details of how a protest works, I'll just refer you to section 9 of the ASA rule book. There's no reason that any coach should ever have to roll over and accept a misinterpretation of a playing rule. The protest rules provide a means to fix umpire blunders like this.

And yet...time and again I hear coaches complain that an umpire shafted his team with a bad rule interpretation. The coach can explain, complain, argue and vent until he's blue in the face- and his blood pressure is boiling- but until he makes his protest official he won't get any relief.

It's a win-win all around. The offended team gets things put right and the umpire learns the proper rule, hopefully preventing him from making the same mistake again.

A couple of other comments:

- I've heard of umpires making this same mistake a few times before. All I can guess is that they are trying to apply the high school baseball rule, where subs do not have re-entry rights.

- The bigger the tournament, the smaller the pool of competent officials. Some of these tourneys get so big that they are scrambling to find enough umpires to cover all the games. So, instead of having the "best" umpires because it's a big or important tournament, they wind up using all of the best umpires AND all of the less-qualified umpires too.

 

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Bretman, we were ready for that as the next step but since the plate umpire allowed us to make the sub after the other coach said that he had no problem with it. We didn't want to have to plop down some cash.

Just a totally frustrating situation.

 

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We had one umpire last night tell one of our players that it was "illegal" for her to swing and time the pitcher while she was in the on-deck circle. He told her it was unsportsmanlike and grounds for ejection......

 

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.....Without going into all the details of how a protest works, I'll just refer you to section 9 of the ASA rule book. There's no reason that any coach should ever have to roll over and accept a misinterpretation of a playing rule. The protest rules provide a means to fix umpire blunders like this......

It's not that simple. Just because you protest doesn't mean they will get it right. Plus you have to put up a big wad of cash and hope that the all mighty decider knows the rules. We had a situation today at the HoO Celebration. Team is batting 9 with DP/Flex and one sub (11 players). Pitcher gets on and they courtesy run with the sub. Next batter is the catcher. She gets on and they trot out the last out to run for her. I said whoaho. They don't have a courtesy runner for the catcher. Umps said yeah they do, it's the last out. I said they have a sub and they are using her for the pitcher, you can't use last out. They told me nope, these are ASA rules. I said nope, they are not. They call some guy over who was maybe the UIC, He confirmed that I was wrong and ASA has always allowed last out to run if you don't have any subs left. I said, you are wrong, these are not ASA rules. I was thinking about protesting but we were losing and were gassed anyway and I didn't want to risk $50 on a protest that wouldn't mean the difference in the game. The plate ump got the real UIC/TD on the phone to talk to me. He also confirmed I was wrong. I tried to tell him he was wrong and I asked him if this was some special rule they made up for this tournament: answer "yes." Now this wasn't pool play but the finals of the losers bracket. Not sure if the tournament was an eastern qualifier or not but I just wish ALL tournaments would just go by the book when it comes to bracket play. It makes it easier on everybody.

Overall, HoO put on a nice tournament. It was very steamy though.

 

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In most tournaments I have been to this year, stated protest cost is $100. That's a lot of money to put up and take a chance that they will even get it right then.

 

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I thought I saw everything till last weekend I saw an base ump texting while the game was going on. TD did a great job he watched the next game and asked him not to show up on Sunday.

 

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It's not that simple. Just because you protest doesn't mean they will get it right. Plus you have to put up a big wad of cash and hope that the all mighty decider knows the rules. We had a situation today at the HoO Celebration. Team is batting 9 with DP/Flex and one sub (11 players). Pitcher gets on and they courtesy run with the sub. Next batter is the catcher. She gets on and they trot out the last out to run for her. I said whoaho. They don't have a courtesy runner for the catcher. Umps said yeah they do, it's the last out. I said they have a sub and they are using her for the pitcher, you can't use last out. They told me nope, these are ASA rules. I said nope, they are not. They call some guy over who was maybe the UIC, He confirmed that I was wrong and ASA has always allowed last out to run if you don't have any subs left. I said, you are wrong, these are not ASA rules. I was thinking about protesting but we were losing and were gassed anyway and I didn't want to risk $50 on a protest that wouldn't mean the difference in the game. The plate ump got the real UIC/TD on the phone to talk to me. He also confirmed I was wrong. I tried to tell him he was wrong and I asked him if this was some special rule they made up for this tournament: answer "yes." Now this wasn't pool play but the finals of the losers bracket. Not sure if the tournament was an eastern qualifier or not but I just wish ALL tournaments would just go by the book when it comes to bracket play. It makes it easier on everybody.

Overall, HoO put on a nice tournament. It was very steamy though.

Have to second that they did a great job with getting this one going.

I/we were told that in this tourney they were letting this happen. We used it all we could and it wasnt an ASA thing when we asked it was a tourney thing. I didnt see it but was told it was on either the application or just in the tourney paperwork. They told us that once you used up your sub to run, then you could use your last out, but only for the pitcher or catcher.

And the sno cones in a cup Kicked Butt at city park( at the bottom of the hill by the HS)

 

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I don't argue with the umps because I don't know all the rules. Can an ump tell a pitcher that she is pitching illegally during an inning BEFORE he calls an illegal pitch? Our team had runners on 2nd and 3rd in a close game and the plate ump told the opposing pitcher that she was illegal because she was not bringing her hands together. Naturally, our coach wanted the official call to advance the runners...

 

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Oh wow, how to describe the momentum that we lost in our game against the Southern California Thunder when the umps blew a question about whether the So Cal coach could go out to the mound without pulling his pitcher (it was the 3rd visit to the mound). Protest ensued by SoCal (and immediately after that they tried one of those "emergency, emergency, go, go, go, everybody's screaming something" decoy plays, which actually resulted in our scoring a run (BH head coach has a PhD from Stanford and runner on third is an honor student with softball smarts, but I guess they thought us folks from Ohio didn't know nothing about sniffing out that a gimick play was on)). What really hurt was not having the ASA official there to make a ruling on the protest, as it would have been a correctable error. Shortly after we had scored, an ASA official showed up and we were told that the protest was being upheld, that we would play out the rest of the game, and that if we won we would have to go back to the 5th inning point when the coach was denied his conference. YOU TRY TELLING YOUR PLAYERS TO KEEP THEIR SPIRITS UP IN THAT SITUATION.

Bretman: once the ruling was made, why didn't we immediately go back to that point in time (before we scored the run) when the coach was improperly denied access to the circle? That would have been a much fairer result. I'm guessing that we should have filed a protest about the ruling that we had to play the game out and win it twice, which I am going to feel very lousy about.

BTW, no payment was required by the So Cal team as part of their protest.

But the whole situation developed because our umpiring crew (nice as they were) didn't know the rules about circle conferences.

 

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I thought I saw everything till last weekend I saw an base ump texting while the game was going on. TD did a great job he watched the next game and asked him not to show up on Sunday.

Saw a similar thing go on with a base ump. Must have received a text and instinctively grabbed his phone and missed a call. Same weekend saw base umps not watching the runners leave early. Told the umps they were leaving early and still not watching. Pretty frustrating as girls were leaving the bag as pitching was beginning her motion. Obvious to all as the runner was already on base when the catcher caught the ball.

 

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Had an umpire this weekend (18U), during pre-game warmup, tell us that if a batter/runner ran through first and did not immediately try to advance to the next base, while coming back to first, they would be called out, said they had problems in a previous game. 2nd inning, the other team gets a hit and batter/runner takes her time coming back to first, pitcher has ball in circle, SS and 2B are heading back to their positions, then batter/runner takes off to second. NO CALL!! It happened to us twice. I jumped the umpire about making a call on a situation he brought up in the conference to no avail!!!

At first I got mad at our girls for not paying attention, but after the game I realized that this should have fell under the "look back rule" and these batter/runners should have been called out.

 

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One of my biggest pet peeves: Charging a fee to file a protest.

The standard rules covering protests DO NOT prescribe any sort of fee to file one. If you're being asked to pony up some obscence amount of cash to file a protest, that is something that the folks running the league or tourney have come up with on their own.

I've heard several reasons why they do this. Usually it's to prevent frivolous protests or to keep the games on schedule. But those excuses don't really hold water.

If a protest is frivolous, then it would be summarily dismissed. Once it's dismissed that's it. There's nothing more for the league/tournament officials to act on, no game to be replayed, no umpires to find to cover the re-played game and no disruption to the schedule. When a protest is rejected there is no cost involved to the league/tourney. So why are they charging a fee?

If the protest is rejected, where does the money go? Into the tournament director's beer fund?

If the protest is upheld, you get your money back anyway. So why bother collecting the cash in the first place? Plus, if it's upheld, the right call gets made. To me, that is a good thing, despite any inconvenience to the schedule.

Charging a protest fee just rubs me the wrong way. Teams are already paying their hard-earned cash for the umpires. Why should they be forced to pay EXTRA to have the right calls made?

 

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Oh wow, how to describe the momentum that we lost in our game against the Southern California Thunder when the umps blew a question about whether the So Cal coach could go out to the mound without pulling his pitcher (it was the 3rd visit to the mound).

If it was only his third charged conference, then it should have been allowed without penalty. You are only forced to pull the pitcher on conferences IN EXCESS of three.

Not sure why they would handle this the way they did. The standard protest rules in the book assume that the remainder of the game is actually played before the protest is reviewed and ruled upon. Then if the team that filed the protest wins the game the protest is moot.

By making a ruling "on the spot", before the game is finished, they were deviating from the standard procedure. So I guess that "standard procedure" went out the widow. If you're going to do it that way it's really best to halt the game entirely and wait for the ruling before playing any further.

I can only guess that they did it this way to reduce the chance of any disruption to the tournament schedule. That's kind of an admirable goal, but the greater goal should be getting the call right and correcting with the least possible inconvenience to the teams playing in that game.

 

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But Bretman, since they DID do it this way, why didn't we just go back to the situation before the protest? We asked that question twice, and got the answer "that's just the way we do it". It really was hard to explain to the girls that they had to win the protested game while knowing that the protest had been upheld and that they would have to win it again.

 

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And it certainly didn't have the potential of minimizing disruption of the tournament schedule. If we had won the ITB, we would have had to replay the final two innings of the game.