Episode 4
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Patrick: [00:00:00] You'd honestly be surprised just how often reading the catcher's response. Can tell you whether or not a pitch you were about to call a strike was a foot off the plate. So use those clues, use those hints. Anytime you're struggling behind the plate. Hey, I'm on vacation every single day 'cause I love my occupation.
Hey, hey, I'm on vacation. If you don't like your life, then you should go and change it. Hey everyone. Happy Friday Tia. Hope you're able to get your games in today. We were rained out yesterday, but. Today it's looking like a beautiful day outside and we'll be able to get on the field. For our Georgia umpires, we're closing in on the end of our regular season.
Next week is the final week and as we're getting ready for the playoffs, we're finishing off a lot of the region games to determine where teams may get seeded in the playoffs or who might and might not make it. Of course, this adds a little bit more fun, a little bit of excitement to the games, but certainly with that [00:01:00] comes stress.
So as I'm talking to all our umpires, You know, remember to go back to the basics, right? Talking about when you're behind the plate, on the rubber, get set, call it. All these little basics are what you need to rely on when the game gets stressful or starts to speed up. And this can get your head back to where it needs to be to properly umpire the game.
So, first thing I want to do now is recap my Wednesday game for you. So we had a game between two schools that are in the same region and both vying for Somewhere between the first and third seed, which is important here in Georgia, because the top two seeds in each region are going to host their first round playoff games.
So going into the game, we knew it was going to be important. And with the rain coming in that we've been dealing with the last week or so, we had to actually move the game time up. So it moved from a 6 PM start to a 5 PM start, which ended up changing who my partner was on the game. He's a great umpire.
He's 75 years old. And. Honestly, moves extremely well and [00:02:00] fast, and has great vision, so for all of you out there, there's now no excuse to not be umpiring until you're 75 years old. So, gonna hold you to that from here on out, uh, that's 46 more years for me, so we'll see how healthy we can keep the knees for that.
But anyways, moving on. Game started off pretty well. When we got into the bottom of the first inning, we had a pitcher who was particularly tall, throwing right handed. And the field we were on, there's really no batter's eye on it, and it was just the perfect time of day where his arm and his release were coming from basically from an angle where it was really hard to pick up out of his hand to the glove.
Now this is going to be something that occurs throughout the entirety of your career, just games where you happen to struggle seeing the ball out of the pitcher's hand. It can be because of the lighting, it can be because he's a funky delivery, it can be you didn't get enough sleep last night. There's a lot of reasons it can happen.
But, to get past that and to still be able to work our game as best as [00:03:00] possible, we really need to focus on getting back to the core of our mechanics. And this goes back to your first time training for Behind the Plate, where you were given the cadence, on the rubber, get set, call it. Whenever we're struggling behind the plate, that timing is usually going to be something that's in question and can help us get back to feeling focused and comfortable behind the plate.
And the biggest key to that, any time we're struggling with tracking Is really make sure we're seeing the ball all the way into the catcher's mitt and letting the catcher's mitt give us an idea of whether or not the pitch was a ball or a strike. The higher the level of baseball you work, the more likely it is that a catcher is going to try to steal ones that are close, borderline, maybe a little bit off, but the less likely they are that they're going to just frame every single pitch because they know if they do that, then it's the boy who cried wolf, right?
If he tries to frame one a foot off the plate and you don't give it to him because you see that he's framing one that's clearly out, then it's Then he's not going to get that one that is two inches off the plate. [00:04:00] So they're going to want to frame pitches that our strikes are pretty damn close to it.
So, for you, anytime you're struggling to see that ball out of the pitcher's hand, wait to see where the catcher catches it, and let his glove tell you whether or not that pitch was close at least to being a strike or not. If you wait on them, and for a lot of new umpires where I see this challenge is on pitches at the bottom of the zone, they'll stop tracking the ball until it's about a foot in front of the plate, eh, a little bit further in front of the plate, but they'll stop tracking it all the way down into the catcher's mitt and call a low pitcher's strike.
Whereas if they just waited a half second longer and seen how the catcher caught the ball and saw that the catcher flipped his glove over to catch it or just how low it was to the ground when he caught it, that can give you a clue that, oh, that pitch was actually down. That pitch was not a strike. But the only way you're going to be able to take advantage of that input is by having good timing and really slowing it down and tracking the ball all the way into the [00:05:00] glove.
So for new umpires and experienced umpires. If you ever feel that you're struggling to see those pitches either at the bottom or outside part of the zone, then really slow down your timing, watch it all the way into the catcher's mitt, and use the catcher's mitt as input to whether or not that pitch was a ball or a strike.
You'd honestly be surprised just how often reading the catcher's response can tell you whether or not a pitch you were about to call a strike was a foot off the plate. So use those clues, use those hints anytime you're struggling behind the plate. Now, moving on from there, we did have some exciting plays in our game.
One of them was a runner on second and a bunt back to the pitcher, where the pitcher was able to look R2 back to second and then throw to first. Now, the throw to first took the first baseman into foul territory, and he had to go back to touch the bag, and it was pretty close. It was hard to tell from the plate angle [00:06:00] just because You're looking at the runner running towards the bag and you're somewhat flatlined.
It's easy to see whether or not the fielder pulled his foot, but it's really hard to make a judgment on who made it back to the bag first. Was it the batter runner or was it the first baseman? And the call that my partner made from the C position was that he was out so that the fielder got to the bag first.
And the coach came out to ask us if we could get help and we got together and he asked me about it. But one thing I wanted to point out to all of you is, when we got together, he told me that he was staying on the 3rd base side of the working area because he was worried about a play going back into 3rd.
And my advice to him was, officiate the play that you know is going to happen, and then Be able to react, focus on the play that is actively happening, because that play is definitely going to need a judgment versus one that may or may not develop. And because he didn't get across the working area, that definitely made it harder for him to tell what the correct call was at first [00:07:00] base.
And this is something that I look for when I'm doing evaluations of umpires. Anytime an umpire starts in C position, where we're going to have a ground ball out going to first base. I'm always looking for hustle out of the umpire to get across the working area over to B position closer to first. So other than that, the game kept moving pretty smoothly.
It was a tight game. I believe it was one to one. And after the bottom of the third inning, the pitching coach for the home team came up to me and he's an older guy, very friendly. Definitely knows the game and really understands, you know, how to work with umpires at the high school level. And he shows me a baseball that has gunk on it, pine tar, something sticky and not like it was covered on all the ball.
It's just on one specific spot that it had a significant amount of pine tar on it. And he said to me, you know, this ball came in and I saw this on it. And, you know, I, [00:08:00] I don't think it was one of our guys, but. You know, it definitely could be something. And I looked at him, and my first answer was, Yeah, but these high schoolers are idiots, and they'll put pine tar on anything, and that's probably what happened here.
Probably like something on his, you know, above the hands on the bat where a player just put a boatload of pine tar on there because that's what high schoolers do. They're, they're high schoolers. So I said, I'll keep an eye for it. And he responded back that, you know, he'd look for it as well to see if he could see where the pitcher was getting it from.
So we get through that. Top of the fourth goes by. It's fine. Bottom of the fourth, that same pitcher comes out and everything looks normal. He does go to his mouth a lot, but he wipes off. So no issue there. And then I start to notice a couple of times, not often, but a couple of times he goes to the bill at his hat and there's a darker spot on there.
And that kind of made me wonder, okay, is that Pintar? Is it not? Now, we do need to be aware that [00:09:00] most high school kids Don't have a clue how they can take advantage of using something like that to manipulate their pitches. It was particularly wet on Wednesday, so the ball was constantly getting dirty and discolored.
This pitcher was constantly asking for new fresh baseballs, and you know that in high school baseball, those usually aren't even rubbed up. So they're still like manufacturer smooth baseballs. So it's very unlikely he'd be asking for those, while also trying to put a foreign substance on the ball to make it more sticky.
So, watched him through the 4th inning, just noticed he went to his hat several times, and thought, okay, well I'm worried that the pitching coach saw that too, and before the next inning he's gonna come out and ask me to check the pitcher. Like I said, I don't think the pitcher is actually cheating, I highly doubt it, in fact, but it does look a little suspicious, so what I did is I called the coach over for the visiting team after that half inning.
And just said to him, Hey, you know, we found a ball over here near the home team dugout that came off the field [00:10:00] when your team was on defense. And there was a very big sticky part on that baseball, just one big sticky part. And I can't help, but notice your pitcher keeps going to his hat. And it'd be really unfortunate if the coach of the home team asked me to check your pitcher for a foreign substance.
And I had to check his hat and there was something sticky on there. And the coach was very appreciative of that, that I gave him that kind of heads up that that's what we might be looking at. And so, you know, he went back to the dugout. I called my half inning. After that half inning, he came back to me and said, Hey, I checked his hat.
There's nothing sticky on there. None of that, and I'll point out that bottom of the inning, with that pitcher after the coach saying that, was still touching his hat because it's just a habit that he has, right? These high schoolers, they do whatever they're gonna do. There's no reason to blow anything out of proportion, and we want to properly work with the coaches of either team, because in high school baseball, you're gonna be working [00:11:00] with that coach for the next 20 years.
He might change schools, you might change associations. You're going to be crossing paths for the next 20 years. It's just the way it works. So the strategy I used was being more cooperative with the coach, giving him a heads up of what might happen, and giving him an opportunity to address that. And with a lot of these coaches that aren't combative, and that's surely not everyone, this is a real friendly way to build that relationship with them without giving them an advantage or unfair treatment.
But giving them a heads up so we don't have to pick up the crappy end of the stick later on. Now that said, I will point out, if it was the head coach of the home team that had come to me and said, I want you to check their pitcher, then yes, I would have had to go and actually check the pitcher. But, since it was just the pitching coach and he was more suspicious than just immediately saying you need to go check that guy, I thought this was a good way to handle this situation without having to cause a big stir over nothing.
And the foreign [00:12:00] substance, it can be a very difficult rule to enforce. You see it in the MLB how hard they've tried to crack down on it, but players can get sticky for multiple reasons, right? They can have sunscreen on, which, if you're as pale as I am, that's fine. You gotta have sunscreen on. Or it can just be pine tar from when they were batting, or like in this scenario, it was probably pine tar from the bat.
So anything we can do to not get into a situation where we have to determine if there's pine tar or something sticky on the pitcher and he was adding it to the ball, anything we can do to avoid that, definitely a positive in our games. So we got through that, definitely an interesting part of the rules.
And then later in the game, the home team Giving up runners on first and second. They were on defense. The home manager, I could see over there that he was talking about something sneaky in his dugout. There was definitely a stir over there like, oh, they're trying to run some kind of trick play or something they think is particularly clever.
[00:13:00] And then he came out and he pulled his starting pitcher. Brought in a relief pitcher and The relief pitcher threw eight warm up pitches and then faced his first batter. I believe he gets hit by pitch on like the third pitch. And then the head coach comes out again and he goes to bring in his original starter.
So the pitcher that started the inning brought in a new pitcher for one batter and then brought back the original pitcher. And ultimately the strategy here that he wanted to run did not pay off for them. But it's important that we talk about what are the rules that apply to this. Remember that in high school baseball, any starter can return once to the game, and in this scenario, the pitcher was pulled from the game and then put back into it because he didn't go to a defensive position and then come back to the mound.
Then, any pitcher that enters the game has to face at least one batter or get to one out to end an inning, which did happen because the batter that the relief pitcher faced got [00:14:00] hit by a pitch. But what are the qualifications for when a starter can return? Remember that if the relief pitcher coming in uses more than eight pitches as preparatory pitches, then the pitcher they replaced cannot return back to the mound because it was some sort of injury claim or whatever.
They can't return back to the mound. So it's important that we did count eight pitches for the relief pitcher that came in and he did not throw more than that. So the starter can come back. But, when the starter comes back, my question for all of you is, how many throws does he get? So, if we have a pitcher returning to the mound, in that inning, how many throws does he get?
Now, I'm going to give you what the, probably, so what we went with on the field was, we were going to give him 5 pitches, but if he had needed 8, we would have given him 8 pitches. Ultimately, the rules book does not specify that any returning pitcher back onto the mound, whether it be in the same inning or a different inning, the rules book doesn't specify how many pitches they [00:15:00] get specific to that scenario.
So the only thing we have to go off is that a substitute pitcher gets eight pitches. In this scenario, even though he's returning in the same inning, he is a starter re entering the game, which makes him a substitute and thus means he can have eight pitches. Now, one disclaimer to that though, is that. He might get eight pitches by rule, but as the plate umpire, try to hurry them up and see if you can get them going with five pitches.
And that's what we did in our scenario. And he was ready to go in five pitches because it had been a minute and 30 seconds. So that's just a scenario. And so building off of that, it was funny because the coach, after the relief pitcher came in, hit the one batter, he took like a minute to fully come out to make his substitution.
You could tell that they were thinking about something in the dugout or they were looking for something. And then he came out and he comes back to talk to me and he says, yeah, sorry for the delay. I told my starter when he came out, I said, you've got on deck. And the [00:16:00] pitcher ran to his car to grab his bat because he thought he was going to be hitting next.
Which was not the case, but it did add a little bit of a delay to our game because we didn't know where he was and I didn't know what they were looking for at the time. But I do want to point out that in our high school games, this is why we don't use a pitch clock like they do in professional baseball.
As well as in college baseball, where they keep it on their hip or they have a visible timer. You know, part of the reason we don't do it at the high school level is that the level of play just isn't quite there yet. Don't get me wrong. We should encourage the players to keep up the pace of play. We should be encouraging them to keep a foot in the box, but the mental strength and the understanding of their surrounding and what's going on can kind of be lost on a lot of these players and just get lost in the momentum of a game.
So someday I'd like to see us getting to a more formal pitch clock in high school baseball, but it's worth noting that for the time being, you know, work with the [00:17:00] players and encourage them to speed up between. Low stress pitches or things of that nature, but also recognize we're trying to build sportsmanship in these players.
We're trying to help them learn how to get through challenging situations on the field, which correlates to life. So, you know, if you have a shortstop going out to the mound to talk to the pitcher and he does it twice in an inning, you can encourage him to speed it up and keep it quick, but it doesn't necessarily need to be shut down immediately because Again, we're trying to get them to learn how to work together to get through situations, and we're trying to let the coaches better communicate to them and give them strategies to get through those situations.
So just some food for thought there, closing up this summary of the game. And now that I'm getting ready to go out on the field on Friday, I'll be taking the plate again today. We're working in a crew of three. One of these teams is already eliminated from the postseason. The other one kind of vying for a [00:18:00] two or three seed in the region.
So should be a fairly exciting game, but definitely not a lot of stress for the home team. I'm working with two newer umpires in a crew of three. And I believe for one of them, this might be their first time working Crew of Three on the bases, and the other one maybe only has two or three games experience doing that.
So, what I know I have to be aware of as the Crew Chief on this game, and the one with the most experience in a Crew of Three, is that I've got to be constantly looking for where do I need to go to fill the gap. In a Crew of Three, especially if you work in the playoffs, and are more experienced Umpires, or working with newer Umpires, It's very important that we be the ones with the experience, looking at the field, taking in what are my partners doing, and adjusting to what they do, regardless of whether or not it's in the mechanics manual.
And I had an interesting conversation with Michael Bates not too long ago. He's the head of umpiring for GHSA. And we were talking about crew of three mechanics [00:19:00] and what's important about it. And the one thing we came back to is that it's so important in a crew of three that you're reading. everyone on the field.
You're reading both of your partners, regardless of what position you're in. The only time we don't is when we have a base umpire on the first baseline and a base umpire on the third baseline. Then the third base umpire should read the first base umpire on whose coverage it is on a trouble ball to center field.
But other than that, we should be reading our partners all the time when working in a crew of three because it's so important, especially when we do it as a team. And frequently as we do, it's so important that you pick up on what your partners are doing, because that makes sure that we don't have the worst thing happen, which is a play happen at a base and no umpire there.
So that's really all I have for you today. I'm going to go watch. So that's really all I have for you today. I'm going to watch. So that's really all I have for you today. I'll let you know how the game goes with my partners, and what I might notice that a lot of newer umpires could [00:20:00] need to know for their first games in a Crew of Three.
And on that note, we do have a Crew of Three video coming out very soon as we get ready for the GHSA playoffs. So keep an eye out for that, and if there's anything And as always, if there's any subjects that you want me to approach, either about career three or career two, you know, whatever, let me know.
Shoot me an email, patrickatumpireclassroom. com. So to wrap it up, as always, thanks so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you on the field.
