Umpiring in baseball is not for the faint of heart. Umpiring in youth baseball can be even tougher.
Such was the case for an umpire at a youth baseball game in Newport Beach, California, where a group of heckling parents made an umpire so frustrated he left the field.
Some of the audio is hard to make out, but the umpire can clearly be heard warning parents to settle down.
“Enough, I’m not hearing another word out of any of you. If you want to have a game here, quiet down.”
It seemed that the game was about to get back on the rails when a parent replied, “stay professional for the kids and just do your job. That’s it.”
However, any hope that the game might be able to continue evaporated quickly after another member of the crowd took a shot at the umpire’s vertical challenges.
“Are you mad because the kids are taller than you?”
And that, more than anything else, appears to be what pushed the ump over the edge. Umpires at youth baseball events get paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 a game.
Apparently, the ump felt that wasn’t enough to deal with the heckling.
Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter @themightygwinn
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