Day 14

It looks like there's a flag on the play. Let's see what the call is. False start #3 Offense. Five day penalty. Retry

They decided they were jumping the gun a little bit with the evaluations. (Actually it was mostly our 70-something year old instructor who underwent heart surgery Thursday and was back on the fields Friday who decided we weren't ready yet) So instead of starting the camp games on Saturday, we're going to delay that by a few days. I think the idea is that even though we've already covered all the positioning material, we still have rules to cover and we could use extra review of the field work as well. I know that I could certainly use some extra days to review the footwork and responsibilities on all the situations.

We had another test Saturday. I got 30/30 on that. We also went over the details of what we're getting ourselves into. If you make it out of here and get selected to go to the PBUC evaluation course, you do that in March. While there, you umpire high school and college tournament games and are evaluated. They rank you and place you into minor league positions, depending on where the jobs are available. In your first season, you get $1900 a month in season, plus $20something per diem. You get small raises each year and for getting promoted to certain levels. The rookie leagues are fairly compact geographically, so they put you up in a condo and you commute to the games every day (they pay you a little bit per mile if you're the driver). In A and up, you get put up in hotels in whatever city you happen to be in. In AA they start giving you your own room instead of having a roommate. When you're going to be making the jump from A to AA, which is 2 man to 3 man crews, they usually send you to the fall instructional league to learn the 3 man system. At AAA, you are no longer evaluated by the minor league people. Instead, the major league supervisors start to look at you. If you're good enough you start to get fill in games and spring training games. And eventually, you hopefully get called up to the majors. So that's my potential career path.

For my off day today, I didn't do much. Last week I did the pizza buffet, so this week it was time to try the Chinese buffet. It was a small place, but they had decent food. Plusses: salmon, shrimp with lobster sauce, and water that doesn't smell awful. Minuses: chicken with broccoli instead of beef with broccoli, iffy fried rice and lo mein, and bad crab rangoon. Overall, I give it a 3/5. Tonight, I went to a laundromat for the first time. I'm pretty sure I was the only non-hispanic person in there. Since I'm fairly tan after being down here for a couple weeks, I blended right in. Everyone talked to me in spanish. One guy tried to sell me razors. Another guy complimented me on my folding technique. I'll definitely be going back there next weekend.