Friday was the day of the Commissions in Dallas

03/12/2011

Dallas (Texas-USA) – Friday December 2 was the day dedicated to the meetings of 2 IBAF Commissions and to a seminar on Field Maintenance.

Dallas (Texas-USA) – Friday December 2 was the day dedicated to the meetings of 2 IBAF Commissions and to a seminar on Field Maintenance.

The meeting of the Development Commission was mainly dedicated to umpires. Chairman of the Umpiring Commission Gus Rodriguez explained that a Committee was created, involving members representing Canada, Italy, South Africa, Taiwan, Major League Baseball. Soon will be added a member representing Oceania and also the Japanese pro Leagues will be represented.

“We want to create a database of informations” said Rodriguez.

The database should be implemented through a section of the IBAF website: “We will incourage all of the umpires to subscribe”.

Rodriguez was very happy about the tournament coverage: “We had a good technical level and 39 countries were represented”.

Tournaments Commission Chairman Jim Baba was also satisfied: “It was a good meeting. We went through a number of new rules that IBAF recently implemented”.

There will be changes in the future: “Basically, everybody agrees on the fact tournaments should be awarded well in advance, in order to help the timing of the evaluation”.

Baba explained that in the near future the Commission has the goal of creating a so called Bid Book, to help the countries that want to organize a tournament to know the standards. Another of the goals of the Commission is to work on a mentorship for Technnical Commissioners, in order to create know how in all of the countries that can potentially organize tournaments.

Most of the Federations attended Murray Cook‘s seminar on Field Maintenance.

“Today’s seminar was called mainly to discuss a Commitee for field and facility development” said Cook “President Fraccari’s vision is about setting standards and train people who can go back to their Federation and share the knowledge”.

The Committee should be responsible for the review of the venues set to host future events: “We aim to create a resource library and indicate to the Federations which materials are actually approved by the IBAF and MLB. The Committee should also be responsible of developing relations with vendors”.

Cook looked happy about the outcome: “I heard many delegates saying that this seminar is going to help their Federation and this makes me happy. But you should double check this with them”.