Am I getting too old for this?

Yesterday was a full day of umpiring for me, and as is usually the case when I have to get up before, say, 11:30am, I was going on short sleep and was maybe a little bit cranky. I was also creaky—for whatever reason, I got out of bed with a sore lower back, just feeling really stiff and achy for no discernable reason other than being well into my fifties. I found myself wishing that it had rained overnight so the field would be unplayable, but that was not this reality.

Even so, things started out fine. My first game featured a number of players who also play against me in my Wednesday night summer league with the Smiling Potatoes of Death; one of them was catching when a particularly errant pitch came in. My call was, "low, outside, flat, generally bad, ball one." This got a chuckle from the batter and this comment from the catcher: "You've been hanging out with [Spuds teammate] Mack too much." I disagree. Anyway, it was a crisply-played affair with good defense and no troubles; we burned through all seven innings in under an hour and even though I had said we'd do extra frames if needed, the home team pulled out a run in the last of the 7th to walk it off in regulation. So I had 30 minutes or so to wait around for the next teams to file in for the 1:30 game. If you're going to have a 58-minute game, I said to no one, can't we have it at the end of the shift instead of the beginning? Alas, no.

Generally speaking, the teams that play in this bracket of the league at Northacres park are all good folks, we all get on well and things are usually copacetic, but there's one guy that bucks the trend. He was there for game two. I ignored him best I could, especially since his teammates all were enthused to have me on the field for them and since we'd finished the prior game early a couple of their early arrivals had time to chat me up a bit. I like the rest of them a lot. But this guy is one of the few players I've ever ejected from a game, and when he's pitching he pushes all my buttons. Sometimes I think on purpose. I really, really dislike him. He tries trick pitches, he snorts and scoffs at my strike zone, he even shouts at me, as when he responded to my call of a low pitch with "LOW??!!" and I replied, incredulously, "yes, it hit the plate, so LOW." And his catcher jumped in to say that it did, in fact, hit the plate, so move along. It crossed my mind to wonder if he was trying to provoke me to throw him out again. Can't imagine why, but I don't grok the macho nonsense some of these guys live with in their little minds, so who knows. When the game was over, he tried to bullshit me about why he was challenging my calls, but I knew it was BS and he likely knew I knew it was BS and again I was befuddled and annoyed and just wanted him to go away. Which he eventually did, because I had to get the next game rolling with different teams, ones with no troublemakers on their rosters.

Aside from my back stiffening up even more, my stomach starting to rumble that breakfast was many hours past, and my feet demanding some downtime, the rest of the games were good, though I did screw up once: in an infield fly situation, a batter lined to the shortstop, who caught the ball—I immediately called "OUT!"—only for the shortstop to intentionally drop the ball in the next instant to turn a double and potential triple play, the entire reason the infield fly rule exists but for good or ill the rule exempts line drives. In the end I allowed the double play but awarded the batter first base safely as he had stopped running as soon as he heard me say "out." In retrospect I should have disallowed all of it, just said, "no, batter is out and everyone else back to your bases, because that was a dick move." And that I had already called the out, so play should have been over. But really I was too quick on the draw, it's my only bad habit (I think) as an ump. I need to learn to take a beat before making those calls just in case.

Then the real fun of the day. As the final game was in its late innings, someone came down to the backstop and asked me if I had a key to the gate. "Gate? What gate?"

It seems someone—the consensus was "probably kids. Meddlesome, troublemaking kids."—closed the gate-like barrier to the parking lot of the park and slapped a padlock on it.

Of course, I did not have a key, nor did anyone else, but I was still working the game, so while we finished up I called the league office and asked if they might call the parks department for us and get someone out to open it up. Game ended, I packed up, and no parks people. One of the players had called the police as well. No help there. Ultimately, one of the players who had parked outside of the gate drove to Home Depot and bought bolt cutters. She returned and I attempted to aid a few of the burlier players in cutting the lock off the gate. In the end, I was no help at all; it took some physics ingenuity and muscle from Brent, one of the late-game pitchers, with the aid of a metal tube that was lying around as part of the parking lot's security apparatus (which he covered one arm of the bolt cutters with to get more leverage), to snap the lock off. We and a smattering of non-softball people could all then leave with our cars and I arranged with the office to have the player reimbursed her outlay for the bolt cutters. The whole thing took an hour or so, by which time I was truly and thoroughly Done With All This for the day. When I got home I made one of my rare uses of the bathtub to soak my aching back before spending the rest of the evening reading a brain-candy Star Trek novel and trying semi-successfully to get to sleep early (for me).

Unfortunately I have to go back out there tonight. Cap Hill this time, so different kinds of wackiness is bound to ensue. My back still hurts some; better but not really better, if you know what I mean. At least it's only two games, and at least ichiban suki na senshu's team is on the docket.