The Mike DiMuro experiment

Personally, I felt that DiMuro was too cocky for his own good. He was too John Hirschbeck-ish in that he would confront players and managers more than necessary, leading to flared tempers and the inevitable mutiny by the Dragons.

If you go back and watch the tape of that incident, Taiho yelled and gestured at DiMuro, a definite no-no anywhere because it's considered showing up the ump, but instead of ignoring the gesture DiMuro quickly yanked off his mask and gave Taiho a "who the bleep do you think you are" look which set Taiho and the rest of the Dragons posse off.

The interesting part about that incident was the way DiMuro changed in the blink of an eye. He was at first acting all tough and cocky, but as soon as the Dragons started to shove him around, he cowered up and practically ran to Leo Gomez for help.

I personally think that an American umpire could work here in Japan without incident as long as he is a patient person and not too confrontational like DiMuro. Maybe DiMuro was too young and cocky at the time. He has been working in MLB for some time now and has not had any major Hirschbeck/Dave Pallone type incidents.

Having said all that, it's probably not a good idea to have foreign umpires here. It works in the J-League, but soccer's a bit different than baseball where every call made by the home plate umpire plays a huge factor in the game.

Wow! Old topic revived; it was a bit of a conversation killer when I posted it.

I wonder: did bringing DiMuro here in the first place involve much of an effort? Did someone have to cut through red tape and step on toes to make it happen? In that case, I can see how a "you've had your fun and it didn't work - let's just forget that idea now" attitude could have killed any thoughts of trying to bring another non-Japanese umpire to NPB (all speculation, of course).

One thing I remember about the DiMuro experiment was that, at the time, there was a de facto "no balk" rule in Pro Yakyu. I remember this because Di Muro was asked about it in a newspaper interview, and he really didn't know much about the practice.

Of course, since then, the Japanese umps have decided that balks are to be called, perhaps even a little too enthusiastically. Did the exposure to American umpiring practices have anything to do with this, or was it based on greater exposure to MLB in general (on TV maybe), with the larger numbers of Japanese players going over there?

An interesting question.