A Sheriff's Deputy/14U Travel Baseball Coach Beat The Shit Out of an Umpire (Who To Be Fair, Allegedly Threw The First Punch) in Starkville, Mississippi
The Dispatch – A deputy with the Oktibbeha County Sheriff’s Office was arrested along with an umpire Sunday following a fight during a Grand Slam baseball tournament at Cornerstone Park.
Lt. Darrell Holley, a coach for Starkville’s 14U Sports Performance Center Select team, and Jeff Akins, an umpire for the tournament, were charged with fighting not in self defense, according to Brandon Lovelady, public information officer for Starkville Police Department. The charge is a misdemeanor.
Adults these days man. It's getting crazy how numb I've gotten to videos like this. There's almost nothing that could go down at a youth sporting event that would surprise me anymore. It's a powder keg of parents and coaches with unreasonable exceptions for their kids, who live vicariously through their kids, and show up to the ballpark ready to come to blows with ANYBODY they feel is standing in the way of whatever insane future they have planned out for them in their heads.
The umpires aren't blameless either when it comes to this "epidemic" either. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they really will just get speared by a drunk 1st base coach because they missed a couple bang-bang plays in a row. And I don't know exactly what sparked the drama in this situation, but in this video, it appears to be the umpire who threw the first punch.
Sorry I'm about to get on my soapbox here, but I umpired travel baseball for 10 years, and for some umpires, there's just something about putting on that uniform that makes them forget how to interact with other people. They also forget that the goal is to be as invisible as possible. But so many umpires think they need to put on this hard ass persona and establish dominance over the park in a way that just isn't needed. When an umpire comes out like that... like he's better and smarter than everyone because he's the umpire in charge, he makes the calls, this is his diamond... that just makes everybody hate them more. All they're doing is throwing more gas on the fire. Umpires who act that way are cut less slack, and held to a higher standard because they treat 14U travel ball game like the World Series game half the parents and coaches think it is.
I get why some umpires feel the need to do it. It's because they see videos like this and think they're walking into an active war zone, so they come into the game with their guard all the way up. In some cases, maybe it's justified. But I've never seen a situation where an umpire like that makes things better as a whole.
There's a dynamic between umpires and coaches at youth sporting events that some people are just not meant to handle. Unfortunately, because again, thanks to videos like this, nobody wants to be an umpire anymore. So these organizations are forced to take pretty much anybody off the street who's willing to do it, whether they're qualified or not.
On the other side of the coin, for the fans and coaches who escalate situations like this... Who cares if the umpire sucks? He's probably only acting that way because he's fucking scared you're going to come at him with a hammer. Nobody is trying to screw over your kid's team. Sometimes umpires are going to blow calls. Sometimes you're going to get a shitty under-qualified ump who doesn't know exactly when he should call a kid out of the baseline. Or god forbid doesn't have a perfectly consistent strike zone. But if parents/coaches actually gave a shit about their kids, and the quality of officiating they'll receive moving forward, making the ballpark hell on earth for umpires is only going to make things worse. If you beat the shit out of every umpire in town, they're not going to magically be replaced by somebody more competent. It'll be some 15-year old kid who's even more under-qualified. And the problem just snowballs.
We've spent a whole lot of time and money developing the technology so that soon, MLB games will be called entirely by computers. At this point, maybe we should focus more on getting that technology into the hands of little leagues across the country. It makes me sad to say it, because for me, umpiring baseball was the best summer job ever ($50 per game, straight cash, no taxes, it rocked), but if we're being honest, youth travel baseball needs ABS WAY more than the MLB ever will.