- Aug 12, 2014
- 648
- 43
I coach two rec teams, one 10U and one 12U in different leagues. The league the 12U team played in ended right when the 10U league started. The second league only has enough players for one 12U team, so the commish has been doing what he can to get them games. He asked if I would be willing to have my 12U team play a few games with them, and of course I agreed.
We played a doubleheader against them last week and they are the slowest moving team I've ever seen. They take forever warming up each inning they are in the field. They change pitchers multiple times mid-inning. They take timeouts to coach players (they are pretty inexperienced). This was compounded by an ump who didn't care. He would just sit on his stool between innings and let them take as much time as they wanted. After the first game, he said we'd start the second game at 8:05. At 8:05, the team was out in rightfield doing drills. I walked over to the ump and asked if we could get started, and he finally called out to the coach to get them out on the field. The first pitch was finally thrown at 8:15.
We only played three innings in the first game and two in the second. Granted some of that was because none of the 7 pitchers or however many they used could throw strikes, and we maxed out 6 runs every inning except one. But the ump was just as bad - at one point he decided he couldn't see the rubber, so he very slowly walked out to the circle, took out his brush and very deliberately cleaned off the rubber, and very slowly walked back behind the plate. It was probably 5 minutes total.
I emailed the commish after to tell him what happened, my concern was more with the ump who let it all happen. The commish said that he heard similar things from other teams that played them (the better 10U teams), and he would talk to them. We're playing another DH against them this week. It's not a situation where they are stalling to run out the clock. They seem to really believe this is the best way to coach their players.
What can we do to try to get them to speed things up?
We played a doubleheader against them last week and they are the slowest moving team I've ever seen. They take forever warming up each inning they are in the field. They change pitchers multiple times mid-inning. They take timeouts to coach players (they are pretty inexperienced). This was compounded by an ump who didn't care. He would just sit on his stool between innings and let them take as much time as they wanted. After the first game, he said we'd start the second game at 8:05. At 8:05, the team was out in rightfield doing drills. I walked over to the ump and asked if we could get started, and he finally called out to the coach to get them out on the field. The first pitch was finally thrown at 8:15.
We only played three innings in the first game and two in the second. Granted some of that was because none of the 7 pitchers or however many they used could throw strikes, and we maxed out 6 runs every inning except one. But the ump was just as bad - at one point he decided he couldn't see the rubber, so he very slowly walked out to the circle, took out his brush and very deliberately cleaned off the rubber, and very slowly walked back behind the plate. It was probably 5 minutes total.
I emailed the commish after to tell him what happened, my concern was more with the ump who let it all happen. The commish said that he heard similar things from other teams that played them (the better 10U teams), and he would talk to them. We're playing another DH against them this week. It's not a situation where they are stalling to run out the clock. They seem to really believe this is the best way to coach their players.
What can we do to try to get them to speed things up?