Baseball Bench Clearing & Umpires

In all my years around the game of baseball I have personally been involved in three bench clearing incidents. As an umpire these three events have taught me many things.

There is no telling when a bench clearing is going to take place. Sunny, cloudy, windy, day game or night game when two teams come together united and committed in bravado and ignorance, nothing is going to prevent that event from happening. Not even an umpire.

What really concerns me the most is that in most all of these asinine events right in the middle of every one of them or at least very nearby are umpires. Why is that?

I can understand why umpires take immediate action to intervene in order to defuse a problem, but after the benches clear, what in the hell is the purpose of an umpiring crew being swallowed up by the idiocy of a brawl or a bench clearing?

Is there a written protocol or job description that says umpires must participate? If it did say we must stay at the event, where is our training to control an on field riot? In fact I have never seen written instructions on how umpires should respond to bench clearings.  

This is a clear failure of national and state baseball and umpiring organizations for not protecting and providing definitive instructions to umpires on how to proceed during bench clearings. It’s as though they want us to believe they never happen.

The individuals, groups or organizations who should speak up to address these dangerous and volatile situations, their lack of actions are just as bad as or worse than the actions of the teams who are clearing their benches.

It is time for those who claim to be the grand powers of authority over the umpiring world to grow a pair and set bench clearing policies that protect the umpires first.  If you want the perks for being oversight, then you must also take responsibility for when things go wrong.  

Since there is no standard policy set for these situations, from this day forward I personally know how I and any partners I am working with will proceed during any bench clearing events.