Part XVIII of Why Youth Sports Umpires and Referees are Calling it Quits!

A veteran umpire I know has a unique way of dealing with parents who don’t hold back letting the umpire know their opinions about how they think the umpire is doing. Sometimes parents who pay a lot of money for their child to play on a high priced “club” team, for some reason expect every call to go their way. In an attempt to get the overly-vocal parent to keep their opinions to themselves the umpire would say to a loudmouth spectator something like, “Sir, since you have so much to say, why don’t we trade places? You can come back here and call balls and strikes, and I’ll sit in your chair and yell at you constantly. Would you like to do that?”

Most times this will embarrass the spectator because the other parents are all laughing at him, so he usually backs right down and apologizes, but one time this didn’t happen. Instead the parent defiantly said to the umpire; “If you’d just do your job like you’re supposed to I wouldn’t be saying anything to you. I pay a lot of money for my son to play on this team, so I can say whatever I want, whether you like it or not, and I think you’re doing a lousy job of umpiring.”

The umpire’s response to that remark was, “Okay, you are being ejected from the game and can go sit in your car for the rest of the game, whether YOU like it or not!”

Next time I’ll talk about coaches who try to get a second umpire to overturn a call made by the first umpire whenever coaches disagree with a call.

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Randy Corwin is a veteran Massachusetts youth baseball umpire and author of the book, OBNOXIOUS PARENTS AND RUTHLESS COACHES, which is now available at Amazon Books, Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore, and at Escape Into Fiction in Franklin, MA. This post is part eighteen of a series of articles based on the book.