About Our Learning Blog
All it took was a phone conversation with baseball enthusiast Steve Johnson to get me to offer to set up yet another blog–this one for high school and college umpires. After leading a basketball officials’ learning blog (www.iaabo.wordpress.com) through this past winter, I believe that a blog for umpires may be a valuable opportunity to entice dedicated officials to spend a little more time thinking about their on-field performance. Let’s see how it goes!
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Steve,
Nice posts I look forward to more as the season starts.
Warren
http://www.umpire-empire.com
Really enjoyed this blog.
Thanks for doing this.
We are glad that we can help. We are very busy this spring but thankfully umpire issues from year to year are similar and the rules do not change much.
Make sure to post your comments and questions for us to share with everyone. It is amazing how many people visit the blog daily (more than 100 almost every day and more than 150 many days).
Have a great summer! Make your fellow umpires and yourself proud.
Quick question…..
what should the call be? runners on 2nd & 3rd batter hits a ball down the 1st baseline and the line judge gives the two hands up and immediatley shifts to the fair ball signal and continues to give it and two runs score batter makes it to 2nd. The umpire calls time and overturns the call to a foul ball and returns the runners and batter. The plate umpire states that he saw it as a fair ball as well but had to over turn the call and make it foul.
Cliff, from your description it is hard to tell how many umpires were on the field. You refer to a line judge, an umpire and the plate umpire. Where were they all positioned? I’m not sure what you mean by a line judge. Was that an umpire stationed behind first base? If so, that was his call, and if he killed the play and later changed his mind, the foul ball call has to stand. We don’t know what the batter runner would have done had he known it was fair to begin with. That’s where the admonition to “Pause, read, and react” comes in very handy as it will help you make the correct call the first time.
the batter hits the ball and then carries his bat to first where he is and gets there before the ball and is safe. the umpires calls interference and the batter out. what would be the correct call .
Assuming the bat did not interfer with anything, I would not have called it. I’d rather the batter/runner carry the bat the let it fly into head or leg!
Hello…hoping to get some feedback on a “call” I made just recent and would like to receive some input.
A runner advanced to 3rd base and while doing so, slightly over ran the base but was able to return safely but in doing so, was unbalanced and the 3rd baseman immediately placed an abrupt tag (2 hand) that caused the runner to come off the base for a split second which I called the runner out. The coach declared that the the base runner “pushed” and/or “shoved” the runner and is the reason he was removed from the base. Any thoughts? Thanks.
you must judge the contact as u see it runer as right base billdougher ,msbl cbua umprie32