This group is one call from making a huge mistake

Sporting News, The, July 26, 1999

The Major League Baseball Umpires Association proved a point when the bulk of its members upstaged the All-Star break and voted to submit their resignations effective September 2.

Unfortunately, it was not the point the umpires were hoping to make.

The umpires only proved again they don't get it. They don't understand that every time union chief Richie Phillips says he's going to take his umpires and go home, an ever larger number of baseball owners--and fans--hope that this time he really means it.

I happen to think that the vast majority of umpires does a great job and that the game will suffer if they go through with walking out on the 1999 season four weeks before the playoffs. I also think men in blue have some legitimate gripes.

Phillips should get tremendous credit for the vast improvement in umpires' salary, benefits and working conditions because of his leadership. But he has either lost perspective or has become so much of a union idealist that he doesn't care if he burns down his house. Maybe both.

The umpires have little leverage and even less hope that someone like former commissioner Peter Ueberroth will arrive on the scene at the last minute and broker an acceptable settlement. If they go through with their threatened resignation, they will forfeit many of their protections under federal labor law and probably will sit out the rest of the season. They might even go the way of the air traffic controllers in the early 1980s, who were replaced for violating a no-strike clause in their union contract.

The best hope from the outset was for the umpires to keep their heads down and try to portray themselves as hard-working blue-collar guardians of the game. But the ultra-contentious Phillips has forced so many confrontations over the past three years, he has all but baited the owners into a showdown he can't win.

Baseball's response has sounded a lot like "Good riddance."

The relationship between the umpires union and ownership--like most collective-bargaining relationships-has been strained from the start, but the acrimony rose to a new level after the notorious 1996 spitting incident involving then-Orioles second baseman Roberto Alomar and John Hirschbeck.

The umpires had the high ground. The American League clearly whiffed when it suspended Alomar only five days and allowed him to play in the postseason while the disciplinary action was pending appeal, but Phillips' ill-fated attempt to order an umpire boycott of the postseason actually diverted attention from the offense.

Since then, he has rarely missed an opportunity to lock horns publicly with ownership, usually using one of the sport's feature events as the stage.

This year, he filed a grievance against management for having the nerve to instruct the umpires on how to standardize the strike zone. More recently, he cried foul when National League umpire Tom Hallion was suspended for three games for bumping a player--though players are routinely suspended for the same period for bumping umpires.

This time, he upstaged the feel-good All-Star break. Baseball had hit an emotional home run with the tearful pregame ceremony involving Hall of Famer Ted Williams, but instead of allowing the fans to ride that emotional wave into the second half, Phillips rubbed their noses in another budding labor dispute.

No wonder the owners seem fed up enough to accept all those resignations and hire a new set of umpires from the college and minor league ranks.

Phillips has his reasons, of course. The union's collective-bargaining agreement is set to run out at the end of the year, and there is increasing speculation that the owners will take a very hard line to try to gain more control over the umpires.

Perhaps taking a page from the union playbook of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Phillips decided to force a confrontation during the regular season instead of letting the owners take control of the situation this winter-when the umpires would be out of sight and out of mind.

He might have hoped to garner media support and public sympathy for the plight of the umpires, but the announcement had the opposite effect. The headline over a column on the New York Post web page last week:

"Go ahead and walk, you porky chumps!"

The rank-and-file of the umpires union deserves more respect than that, but the umpires have been stereotyped as overweight, arrogant autograph sellers who mistakenly believe they are as important to "The Show" as the players.

That's too bad, because they all worked long years in the minors to perfect their craft and earn the right to be called major league umpires. Here's hoping they don't throw it away on the whim of their hard-nosed union chief.

Management's intent to consolidate the umpires from both leagues under the supervision of the commissioner's office is not unreasonable, especially now that inter-league play has created a jurisdictional problem.

The union has legitimate concerns about the possibility that management will try to enforce stricter physical standards and institute a performance evaluation system, but it makes more sense to try for a more palatable contract than risk a mass resignation.