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

With the 2023 season concluded, youth baseball is alive and well, but it has a serious problem which has been ignored for many years. Now in my fifteenth year of umpiring, I’ve seen far too many excellent officials give up this gig, tired of the abuse we face from overly competitive parents and coaches.

Umpires are resigning at an alarming rate, and this downward trend has been happening for years. Although many worker shortages may have originated during the nightmare that turned the world upside down in 2020, we can’t blame the umpire shortage on the pandemic. Covid-19 didn’t help, but the current shortage of youth sports officials had been brewing for years.The umpire association I belong to appears to be indicative of what’s happening around the country. In 2011, the Central Massachusetts Baseball Umpires Association (CMBUA) had 175 members.Today, after twelve years of consistently having ten-fifteen umpires retiring, and bringing in only five or six new ones, we now have 98 members. Our average age is sixty-two, and many older umpires that used to work one hundred games a year now work fifty or fewer games. Colleagues around the country tell me this is happening everywhere.

Our assignors were besieged with requests prior to the season to provide umpires for both new town recreational leagues and new competitive club teams. Regrettably our assignors had to turn down these opportunities, as they knew we’d struggle to fill games for the leagues we already serve, which happened. There were games this season that needed to be rescheduled because there weren’t enough umpires available. We somehow made it through the season, but barely. I hope I’m wrong, but the umpire shortage may be even worse next year.

Next time, I’ll discuss some other observations I had regarding the umpire shortage during the 2023 baseball season.

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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 An Unlikely Story Bookstore and Cafe in Plainville, MA. This post is part one of a series of articles based on the book.