Thursday was “arrival day.” The umpires are being housed in a very nice Hampton Inn located about 10-15 minutes away from the Little League complex. I drove up in the morning, checked into the hotel and then went over to the complex for our scheduled umpire meeting. One minor bit of amusement – finding the Little League complex was easy enough, but there wasn’t any obvious parking. Fortunately, I was able to flag down one of the many staff working on the grounds, who told me that we were to park in an adjacent elementary school’s lot.
At the umpire meeting, I met the other 11 members of the umpiring crew, as well as the umpire staff members who would be guiding us through the tournament. This included Frank Policano, Umpire-in-Chief for Eastern Region, “Doc” Lantiere, his assistant, and Jack and Ron Leary. It quickly became apparent that, although Frank is the UIC, “Doc” actually runs the show.
Since this is essentially two separate tournaments being run simultaneously, the 12 umpires were, at least for the first three days, divided into two 6-man crews, with the umpires from New England scheduled to work the Mid-Atlantic team games and vice versa. Being from New Jersey, I would thus be working New England team games. We were told that, later in the tournament, the two crews might be “mixed and matched” somewhat, but for the first three days we’d stay together.
After the meeting we got a tour of Breen field. The field has been completely redone this year. The fences were moved back from 200 feet to 225 feet (an indication of the increased power that today’s Little Leaguers have), new scoreboard, new lights, etc. The field has “media wells” on both the first and third base side – a large, raised platform on which TV cameras would eventually go, and then an inset area past that for photographers. The latter would be significant for overthrows of first or third base, since they were dead ball areas. They were not as complex to play around as the TV platforms at the old Southern Region field in St. Petersburg, however, having been pretty well integrated into the field.
As we finished up our tour of the field, the coaches and managers arrived for theirs, and we stayed to hear the instructions that were given to them. These obviously duplicated our own instructions, but it’s always useful to hear the questions and answers.
The day closed with a chicken barbecue for all concerned. Evening activities include fireworks, along with performances by “Dugout” (the Little League mascot) and some local young ladies dancing.
We had met Laura Pye, the lady who performs as “Dugout” during our umpire meeting. We had been instructed to “play along” with her – trying to claim that “I can’t dance” is apparently a recipe for being picked on even more. As it worked out, we saw relatively little of Dugout during the tournament, most likely due to the heat and humidity. I can’t imagine what it felt like inside the costume, but Laura is very good at what she does, and gets lots of grins out of kids that would normally profess to be too grown up to enjoy a six-foot chipmunk.
About the only thing the Eastern Regional complex lacks is a dedicated area for the umpires. We hung out in two rooms off the Recreation Hall, one of which was our “meeting place,” with chairs around the edge of the room, and a second that was set up as a bedroom with two beds, a bathroom/shower and some small lockers. Access to the lockers was a little constricted – we kind of had to take turns getting things in and out of them. It did, however, give us a secure place to stash wallets, etc. Being right off the Rec Hall, however, we had to be rather careful to make sure that doors were closed while we were changing – during the day there were almost always kids playing foosball or air hockey or sitting watching the television that was in there. I gather this was even more the case when the softball tournament takes place – at least most of the kids there during our tournament were boys. (One exception – Massachusetts had a really good girl player along – they commented during the opening ceremonies that she was the only girl to have made it to the Eastern Regional two years in a row.)
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