Helping out the other team

daave266 said:

This is always a tough one. Our team has been on the winning side of these a few times and recently found ourselves on the losing side. The winning team was up by 8 or so...not enough to run rule. I typically have no expectation of the other team taking it easy, but apparently the umpire thought he should. BR on 1st and 3rd and the girl from first goes to second and the ump calls her out for leaving early. Later on he came to me and told me, that the girl didn't leave early but thought the other team should have done it on their own.

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Totally off topic - but that isn't the umpires job to make this decision. Real pet peeve of mine and really not acceptable.

I think it depends a lot on how you're getting on/scoring runs.

If you're scoring because it's walk after walk with a HBP mixed in? Just step off to get things going. Nobody's benefiting from the situation.

Has the other team made a few errors with a few legit hits mixed in? I don't see anything wrong with hitting and not stepping off early in the game (at a certain point I'd stop stealing, taking extra bases, etc.).

We had a game this year where the other team scored 7 unearned runs in the top of the 1st entirely because our defense started off the inning poorly. I know our girls, and I know they weren't really overmatched (the team is better than us, but not 7-runs-in-the-first-inning better). I would have preferred to let the inning play out.

On the other hand, last year in the state tournament I wanted to give the other team's coach a big kiss when he had his team step off the base early because we had no business being on the same field as them, and even though some of their runs were the result of our errors, the game probably should've been 16 or 17 to nothing instead of 22-0. We had no shot, so let's just wrap things up ASAP.

marriard said:

Totally off topic - but that isn't the umpires job to make this decision. Real pet peeve of mine and really not acceptable.

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I agree with this!!!!! I would be upset with that from either side.

Our little first year 12U team has only been up enough to need to show mercy in one game all year. HC had them stop stealing. I think he did have one step off eventually (I think final was 14-0). He doesn't expect or even want other teams to let up on us, when it's reversed, which is the slightly more common scenario this year.