Officiating on the Big Screen - King of the Hill

The latest Officiating on the Big Screen features a King of the Hill episode in which Hank and Peggy Hill play on the same team in Stickland Propane's company softball league. Umpire Jeff Boomhauer calls balls and strikes and at one point ejects a disgruntled Hank after a safe call doesn't go his way.

This particular analysis of the KoTH television episode "Take Me Out of the Ballgame" includes both softball and baseball rules discussion (the rules for this episode's purposes mostly match), and discusses such scenarios as legal/illegal equipment, a player having a heart attack on the field during a live ball, batter-runner Dale Gribble jumping over said incapacitated player, a pitcher who cannot find the strike zone, and former Texas Rangers slugger Kurt Bevacqua's climactic at-bat that could have ended differently.

Stick around until the end of the video to see a further analysis of the psychological nature of Hank's ill-fated argument with the umpire, and how Hank's onscreen anger is oddly representative of some of the outbursts umpires are witness to during real-world games, and how such umpire abuse, while acute and wrought with emotion, is rarely about a personal dispute with the umpire and instead may be an example of the defense mechanism known as displacement.

Related Post: Gil's Call: The Blame Game (Umpire Scapegoating) (8/8/14).

Thatherton! | Video as follows:

Alternate Link: Umpire and Rules Analysis of King of the Hill's Softball Episode (CCS)