wadeintothem wrote:Don’t block inside with poor positioning. Definitely don’t adjust inside after the pitchers hands come together and the pitch has begun. That is the main complaint umpires when talking about poor catchers.. catchers who screen them from the plate. We have to work girl! Get your big dome out of our way. Umpires set when a pitchers hands come together. So if you reset after the pitcher has put their hands together, you shielded us from the plate. A pitch we cant see must be called a ball, and there is also a slight feeling of wanting to punish you for your terrible catching. You effectively stole those spots in the zone from your team. You hurt your team. That, is "your bad".
OK, a question about this paragraph. My DD was catching 12U this weekend, and she is a decent sized girl (about 5'7", 120ish lbs), and we've been working with her on her stance, she had a habit of sitting down on her legs/feet too much, rather than raising up into a squatting position to receive the pitch. She also had her feet too close together, which tied into the same problem. So, we had her concentrating on being in a better catching position, especially with runners on base, to take less strain off of her knees and so she could be quicker if she had to come up and fire.
So, the first inning our pitcher walks a batter or 2, and our coach asks the umpire if a couple of the pitches she threw outside-low were missing outside or low, and he responds....
"Well, your catcher is too tall, so I can't always see where they are, so I'm not sure where they missed, I just called them a ball because I couldn't see them...."
While that is somewhat what Wade said above, she wasn't moving to the side at all, just raising up maybe 4-6 inches. I paid attention the next inning, and the ump was sitting at least 4 feet behind her, which is about 3 and a half feet farther back than where I set up, so I'm thinking that had something to do with him not being able to see low pitches.
