Lemonade from lemons

Last night my softball team, the Smiling Potatoes of Death, played another game and once more got to play a full seven innings without being mercy ruled. You might think this is a celebratory event, continuing our unprecedented streak of non-mercy-rule-shortened games, but the only reason it wasn't shortened was because our umpire, the newly-christened Worst Umpire in the World, did not know what the score was.

I mean, we'll take it. We never like being told we only get four or five innings to play. But it was hard to enjoy once again, because of the ridiculous officiating.

We played against a team that is made up mostly of players I know from my Northacres ump shifts on Sundays, so it's not like we had no fun at all. And, most likely, I am more sensitive to the atrocious umpiring than the rest of my team is because I, as an ump myself, am so much more in tune with just how very bad this dude was at his job. (I'm by no means a perfect ump, I make plenty of mistakes, but not like this guy. I know the rules, for one thing, and if I'm not sure of something or I know I've blown a call I'll own it.)

Like a couple of weeks ago, I was only partly successful in holding my tongue during the game. While I did not attempt to give this guy a seminar on what the rulebook says about the batters' box, I did tell him that he had to actually, you know, make it known to the players beyond the batter that he was calling someone out for any reason, even if it is a made-up "violation" of a rule. When it seemed there was a missing baserunner, we had to ask him what was going on; he said he'd called someone out for stepping out of the box, and I told him that "none of us knew that," to which he replied, "that's not my fault."

"YES, IT IS." I said. "YOU'RE THE UMPIRE."

I also yelled to him that he had not called an out-of-play ball as being out of play and allowed an illegal home run. I also made reference while batting to his quiet "humf" noise to call a strike call as insufficient. I also did several nonverbal things that no doubt revealed my displeasure with the umpire's performance. At one point it became clear that my co-captain was a hair's breadth away from making a visit to the mound (I was pitching) to keep me from getting ejected. And yet, I really was holding back.

But after the game was over for a while, I began to change my attitude. Too late for this game, of course, but for next week and then on, I will not be voicing or expressing clear displeasure with the Seattle Parks & Rec umpires no matter how absurd their job performance. Instead, I will appreciate it. I will probably even laugh.

These guys provide a service to the league I umpire for by being so incredibly bad. My work league is, after all, considerably more expensive to play in than is a season of SP&R softball, so a vast disparity in officiating quality can only help. The rules we use are better, the time limit on games is longer, and the officiating is far and away better, giving, hopefully, a proportionate value for the higher fees. I don't know all of the umps that share in my work league; we always have some turnover and I'm not allowed to train the newbies any more, so it's possible we have a lemon or two in the mix. But I feel safe in postulating that the worst of us is an order of magnitude better than the best ump working an SP&R game. (I think we had the top of SP&R's heap last week and he was merely inoffensive.)

It occurs to me that I'm beginning to repeat myself a bit, having written some of this same stuff two games back, so I'll move on.

Oh, we lost by a score on the order of I-don't-really-know-but-let's-call-it-17-3. In SP&R the teams themselves are responsible for scorekeeping and reporting winners and losers and so on, and our dugout was a bit inattentive when our side was in the field and didn't keep track. Plus, with a couple of runs disallowed by the umpire because reasons, I'm not even sure how many we scored. I do know that I had another crap game at bat, with nothing but weak grounders and another 0-fer. Alas.

Meanwhile, my week as an umpire myself continues in a little while as I have two games tonight. I had four games last Sunday, two scheduled on Monday which were rained out, and three Tuesday. I'll cap the week with two tomorrow night as well. Tuesday at Cap Hill was rather uneventful as Cap Hill shifts go, but there was still a fair number of squares to mark off on the bingo card. It was my only shift there this week, so I'll have to wait until Monday to try again for a first bingo.