12 innings

the last baseball game of my season was yesterday. it was a Semi-Final at the Manitoba Provincial Bantam AA Championships. Dauphin MB played Stonewall MB and it was just shy of 30 degrees outside while i worked the plate for the game. with that sort of temperature you don't want to be out there for a long time, especially wearing 15 lbs of extra equipment. however ... the game was tied after the regulation 7 innings so we kept going til we had a winner. i was about ready to fall over from heat stroke after 7 but we weren't done.

Dauphin scored 2 in the 9th but Stonewall came right back and got 2 of their own in the 9th, so we kept going. finally an overthrow in the 12th meant a run scored for Stonewall and the game ended 7-6. i was grateful for a cold beverage when it was all done and i couldn't shake a headache the rest of the night. yes, i believe i had a touch of heat stroke after it all. i even took the next day off so that i could allow my headache to go away and for my legs to not be so wobbly whenever i tried to do something.

neither team liked my strike zone after about the 4th inning. there was way too much complaining about the inconsistency of it all but that just says to me that they don't understand that i'm not going to give them low AND outside although i might be willing to give them outside alone so long as it isn't LOW; or i might be willing to give them inside if the ball is moving toward the corner but not if they just throw it inside and expect a strike call. i was accused of "squeezing" pitchers, meaning i made the strike zone tighter as the game went on and i was flat out called inconsistent on more than one occasion. let me just tell you, that ain't cool to be calling an umpire.

i get it though. it's a stressful situation and nobody likes to lose. nobody got thrown out of the game and i just don't want to be a deciding factor in the course of the game. in the end i only regret 2 pitches out of the several hundred i saw and neither of those pitches affected the outcome of the game. that's pretty good in my books.

well, that's my baseball season. i .. am ... outa here.