Submitted by Ralph Nardo, 2002 Volunteer of the Year--

If you ask a baseball aficionado who is the most important player on the field you will get a different answer from each one.  Some will say the catcher because he calls the pitches.  Many will say the pitcher because he must make the pitch.  Some will say the infield because of their critical defensive skills.  Still others will say the managers because their tactics often decide the outcome.  However, I’d like to propose another person not previously mentioned who is especially critical in Little League.  That is the Umpire.  Yes, I said the umpire.

Why would the umpire be the most important player on the field in a Little League game?  They are all unpaid volunteers trying their very best to do a job many are unwilling to do.  If the ump is not a volunteer, he’s a coach or manager.  This often means that he must be at his own team’s practices and games along with spending time umpiring 1 or 2 games a week.  That’s a tremendous amount of time to ask of a volunteer in any organization.  If there were a group of volunteers to take this burden off their shoulders, they would be extremely grateful. 

This is where parents who are not coaches or managers can play a role.  The coaches and managers who must also umpire the game after theirs is over are often exhausted and therefore, prone to mistakes.  If the umpires were fresh, this problem could be eliminated.  Also, volunteer umpires would only have to umpire twice a week to lift the burden off the managers and coaches.  They could do it more but twice a week is probably the minimum to maintain the skills to be consistent with making calls, especially behind the plate.  Which brings me to my next point.

A group of volunteer umpires trained to do thing the same way and use the same techniques would provide much more consistency for the players from game to game.  There would still be variations from ump to ump such as one having a low strike zone or a wide strike zone but that’s part of human nature and you cannot remove that from the game.  But trained volunteers would provide more consistency game to game than tired managers and coaches who are already giving several hours a day, seven days a week.  They sometimes even have to man the concession stands and also pull duty as Park Ranger at the fields which means they have to be there that night (usually for one full week) for both games.