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

Nothing makes umpires dislike the job more than lopsided games where one team is absolutely destroying the other one. Most youth leagues, in an effort to try to make these painful games slightly less painful, will have a “mercy rule” which basically says something like “a seven inning game will end after four innings if one team is up by 15 runs or more, or after 5 innings if one team is up by 10 runs or more.” Some leagues also have 2 hour time limits for games. This way, if the game is horrible, at least the horror show will only last two hours.

Unfortunately, some leagues decide in their infinite wisdom, to have NEITHER a mercy rule or time limit for their games. Why anyone would make this decision defies logic. How does anyone on either side benefit when one team is beating the other team to a pulp, if we make the losing team keep going until the bitter end? If the winning coach tries to be “a gentleman”, he can tell his players not to try to take the extra base, and not to steal or advance on the constant passed balls so he won’t look like an ass that’s trying to “run up the score”. Either that or he can have his players keep playing hard, and then look like an ass who is indeed trying to “run up the score.” Either way, the winning coach looks like an ass!

Regardless of how the winning coach decides to have his team play, the game is slow moving, and the umpire and everyone else can’t wait for the game to come to its agonizing conclusion.

I once umpired a legion game where to say one team was destroying the other was a major understatement. After one inning, the score was 11-0. After two innings it was 19-1. After three it was 25-1. It took two hours to play three innings, which is about how long it normally takes to play a full seven inning game. In the fourth inning, I went to the winning coach to ask about the mercy rule, where I found out that this league doesn’t use one. I then went to the losing coach, who insisted on going the distance even though his team was being pulverized, obliterated, manhandled, and torn into bite size pieces by their far superior opponent.

The final score of the game was 37-3, which took three hours and forty minutes to play, almost twice as long as a normal game. Honestly, it felt more like forty days and forty nights.

Two good ways to make umpires want to quit are having neither a mercy rule or time limit!

Next time I’ll talk about coaches who seem to do everything possible to make baseball games crawl along as slowly as possible, and then complain when the umpire has to cut the game short because of darkness.

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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 twenty three of a series of articles based on the book.