alling the bases was always very difficult for me because I didn't get much practice. Plate hogs like me generally get out from behind the mask only on double headers. But your candidate umpires will spend many evenings in B and C. Following these suggestions will make them better overnight.

Bases

• Pause, read, and react.

Even if you’ve only called one game, you already know how to read and react. Because of that, I was never enamored of P2R and so didn’t include it — by name — in my clinics. I thought it was just a button phrase, something the big-time clinician can say that amateur teachers don’t.

Here's another reason I gave it short shrift: It’s never an appropriate technique for the umpire in Position A in a two-man system. That's because on balls hit into the infield, he doesn’t have to pause: He already knows where the throw will go, so he reacts to the crack of the bat and needs only to read the quality of the throw. We might say, then, for an umpire in A, it’s 2RR, or 2R in reverse: react and read.

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