I love baseball, don't get me wrong. I umpire every chance I can get, but a couple of weekends ago I did something that made me think about my limits. Three weekends ago I did the most games I have ever done in one day. I did 6 16U baseball games on one Saturday. I started at 8:3o am and finished at 9pm. It made for a very long day for sure.
This day got me too thinking, how many games should an umpire do before we begin to lose effectiveness, our judgement begins to wain, and we just get plain grumpy and tired? I think there are a lot of variables that go into how long umpires should go in a day. Weather (hot, cool, medium) is the biggest factor in my mind. The weekend I talked about above was hot, and muggy, which made it that much tougher.
If I can give some advice, I would advise to be careful about how many games you can do in a day. I found out the hard way that 6 was definitely too many for me. I will most likely schedule no more than 4 in a day for the rest of my career.
Hopefully all of the summer leagues you are officiating are going great!
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