It Began After I Saw It! What Did I See?? … Plus a comment about May Day.

While teaching I was also an umpire for high school baseball and softball.  Most of the time the games went very smooth, but occasionally things would get a little wild.  Here's a recap of one of those games.  

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Transcript

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Hey there, welcome back to Hang On Keep Cool. I'm Mr. S and today I want to tell you a story about baseball. When we were teaching, after school, my principal and I were umpires, and we would do a lot of baseball umpiring in the spring, both uh boys' baseball and girls' softball. Well, one day after school we traveled over to do uh a game, and I guess it was an important game. Uh I can't remember who they were playing, and it really wasn't our concern, it was just another game to us. But anyhow, I was the base umpire, and my principal was the umpire behind the plate calling balls and strikes. And right in the very first inning, we got into a little trouble. The bases were loaded and there were no outs, and the batter hit a high pop-up fly ball in the shallow right field, and the second baseman came over to catch it, and before it came down, I put my arm up and I yelled, infield fly, batter is out, and that went wild with the crowd, and it showed me they didn't really know the rules of baseball very well. But anyhow, an infield fly is when a pop-up can be caught by any infielder with ordinary effort if it's a fair ball, no matter where that is, and there has to be uh less than two outs and base runners on first and second, or bases loaded. And so they're screaming and yelling, and one of the fans yelled out to the uh plate umpire, you know, uh, how does he know that whatever the plate umpire yelled back because he saw it, and then oh yeah, you should have heard the crowd then yelling at me, oh yeah, he saw it, alright. Yeah, here, give him some glasses, maybe he can see it better. And it just went on and on, and finally their coach came out and he was ripping mad as he started screaming at the plate umpire, and then he kicked some dirt on him, and probably by accident, but you can't do that. So the home plate umpire ejected the coach from the game. So that made the assistant coach now the coach, and he was mad too. The crowd's still yelling, so he came running out and he's yelling at the umpire, the plate umpire for throw uh ejecting the coach. And I think what happened there, he kicked some dust on him too, or some dirt. And I looked over and the plate umpire's ejecting him from the game. This is all in the first inning. And so they had to get someone out of the uh uh spectators to come out and finish this game coaching, and they asked if asked us if that was alright, and we said, yeah, you know, go ahead and do it. Well, we get into the next inning, and an argument started because of a strike being called on the batter, and everyone thought it wasn't a strike except a home plate umpire. It looked alright to me from where I was standing. But anyhow, this guy that's now the coach of the team, running the team, he comes out and he's yelling and going irate, probably a little bit of showing off is what it was. But anyhow, I looked up and there's a player he's ejecting him from the game. So now they got nobody. Both coaches were ejected. The guy from the audience that came out, he's got ejected, and I can't remember who ran the team, but we wanted to finish the game, and so did they after everyone cooled down. But the yelling never stopped. The rest of the game went pretty smooth. But the crowd, everything that out, uh runner out at first, runner out at second, the crowd still yelling, yeah, he's out and he saw it. He's got great eyes, he saw it, blah, blah, blah. And so that was quite a game. And finally, after this last out of the seventh inning, we the game's over, and the parking lot was out there just beyond the outfield, and I looked out there and there was a police car there. So I I told uh I told my buddy, I said, look let's get in our car and get out of here before something else goes wrong. And so we did, we got in, we went back home, and everything ended fine. So that was uh one of the times I umpired, I won't forget about it. Uh that was quite a game. So I hope you enjoyed that. But before I sign out, I want to comment on what's happening today. Today's May 1st, May Day. Our country's largest union, the National Education Association, is calling for teachers and students to join a nationwide protest today instead of going to school. In my 30 years of teaching, and my wife was a teacher too, we never considered skipping school to protest our country. But many schools are doing just that today. We became teachers because we love kids and wanted to teach them reading and writing, math, science, history, art, physic, etc., and citizenship. And to do this right, there is no time for protesting. It's time that all teachers are required to do what they are hired for, and that's to teach. And that's my opinion. Thanks for listening, and don't forget until the next time, hang on and keep cool.