Wednesday, May. 11, 2005
Ejection, posted at 9:05 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I was ejected from tonight's baseball game.See, the umpire was bugging my team all game to hustle in and out. I'm pretty big on this, too, but I didn't see anything egregious all day. The couple times he did pick out a player who he thought wasn't hustling on the field, it was because of things that weren't really any of his business - a pair of broken sunglasses, an untied shoelace. So whatever. I didn't really care.
Anyhow, my team is up, and comes in off the field. My right fielder, a senior playing his last regular season game of high school baseball and having the single best game of his four-year career, had taken an errant throw to the cheek earlier in the game. He's up first, but he rushes to his ice pack to ice himself up before he's up. The umpire yells "Batter Up!" twice, and my player didn't hear him because of the ice pack over his cheek and ear, so the umpire ordered his pitcher to throw a pitch.
I flipped out. I told him that was absolutely ridiculous. I told him this a number of times, and very loudly. He invited me to leave the field area. I walked as slowly as humanly possible back, glaring at him like a mofo.
The reason I was so pissed is this jackass was late for the game. Twenty minutes late. We thought we were going to have to call the game. If he wants to hurry a game up, he should arrive on time. I repeated this loudly over and over again behind him once I was removed, begging him to turn around and get into it with me. I think at this point he knew he was wrong and didn't. I thought really hard about picking a fight with him about it the next half inning - and my volunteer coach was trying to get him to say something else - but the guy knew he was wrong, I surmise, and didn't.
Part of me wishes I would have gone off a bit more. I had this whole speech about how these are kids playing a game and an umpire shouldn't throw his ego around, especially when said umpire arrives twenty minutes late a game. I would even have considered putting the word "fucking" in front of the word "ego." And I probably would have if we were losing, or if we were playing poorly. Alan Trammell got tossed the other day from a ballgame for dropping his ballcap. I'd love to do that sort of thing. But if the team is winning, why? Plus, we have a big playoff game on Friday and I didn't want to risk missing it.
We won 12-9. I got dumped with the water cooler after the game. They loved the fact that I got tossed. We end our regular season at 9-5, the first winning season our baseball team has had at our school in at least four years. We should be 11-5, and would be, if we were allowed to play those last two games. But I'll take 9-5. That fucking rocks. I hope I can figure out a way to bring them all to the next level next year. A city championship would be amazing.
Playoffs start Friday. We have a chance on Friday, but we'll lose on Monday if we make it that far... we're playing the 4th best team in the state that day. But Friday's is doable. Life is good.