The Thin Blue Line

Dylan Bumbarger

I am not Richie Phillips' biggest fan.

On the other hand, after hearing what other people say about him, maybe I am.

There isn't a lot said that's positive about the effect Phillips and the Major League umpires' union has had on the game the last few years. Most people see a corrupt union head, a Jimmy Hoffa stereotype, leading a bunch of fat cats interested not in the game but in feeding their egos and holding onto their cushy jobs. The funny thing is that you could make this claim about the players, too, but some of the same people who defend the players' union are the umpires' union's biggest detractors.

The number one complaint logged against the union seems to be the tenure system of umpires. "The system doesn't do anything to weed out the bad umpires, so they stay around season after season," the argument goes. And that argument is completely true. The union has it set up so that it is very, very difficult to make changes in the umpiring rosters. Bad umpires, and they do exist, stick around.

But, in my opinion, this is the best thing Richie Phillips has been able to do for umpires, and, yes, even for baseball in general. Making it easier for the leagues to fire/demote umpires does eliminate the worst ones, but it opens up a bigger can of worms - subjecting umps to league politics.

The time you most often hear fans talking about disciplining incompetent umps is after one has missed one against their team. Some Mariners fans did it a couple of weeks ago when Rich Garcia missed one, and he's probably the best in the AL. If the league got some real power to fire umps, how long do you think it would be before George Steinbrenner or Peter Angelos tried to throw his weight around?

It's difficult enough to figure out who is bad. Some guys consistently rank at the bottom of various polls on umpiring quality, but others bounce all over the place. The late Ron Luciano was once rated the best umpire one year and the worst umpire the next. Jerry Crawford has gone from a low rating to a high one. Durwood Merrill and Eric Gregg have inspired widely differing opinions about their quality.

You throw politics into this, make the umpires worry about having to pleasing league officials and owners, and umpires are going to get fired for all kinds of reasons. And eventually you'll have problems like the NBA, where favoritism is rampant, or Japanese baseball, where it's considered a fact of life that the Yomiuri Giants are favored, and the strike zone differs widely depending on the batter. Or like "old days" of MLB, when umpires Al Salerno and Bill Valentine tried to form a union; they were declared incompetent and eventually fired. I think baseball is better off having its umpires almost completely independent.

Not that there isn't some middle ground. There should be a workable system so you can weed out the bad umpires, while still shielding them from owners' politics. And the umpire review board that's been set up might be a step in the right direction. But what the owners have missed is that these things are to be worked out in negotiation. It's always seemed to me that the owners have been more intent on holding the line on umpires' salaries than actually improving the profession. If the owners want more power over the umpires, they are going to have to pay for it. So far, they haven't been willing to do that. This isn't Richie Phillips' fault.

Another situation where the union took a black eye was everything regarding the Alomar incident. First of all, the union had a right to be angry; the league's light punishment made it appear that Hirschbeck was the one at fault. The lack of support from the league not only undermined Hirschbeck's credibility with the players, it undermined the credibility of every ump in the majors. It's understandable that umps would want something back for this lack of support. But what did they really do? One, they threatened to strike. The courts told them they couldn't, so they didn't, end of story. Two, they delayed a playoff game twenty minutes. Big deal, ESPN's schedule was screwed up.

Three, and the only big thing they did, was this macho-sounding ejection policy, in which umpires were supposedly going to eject anyone who looked at them funny. They stopped this "policy" after one month, not that anyone could tell it had been in effect. It was so ineffective that I had no idea when they'd stopped it until leafing through Durwood Merrill's book. I noticed once when Lou Piniella got kicked out of a spring training game. That was it. The net result was basically no change, just a lot of talk. Still, they had a right to bluster about this, so give them a break, OK?

I'm not an apologist for the union. From what I've heard about Richie Phillips as a person, I don't like him. He's an arrogant, loudmouthed jerk. I think his mouth has brought on some problems for the umpires he represents. A better message would have been sent with the ejections in April 1997 if they'd been quieter about it, rather than Phillips making these brash proclamations about umpires not taking any more crap. His tactics have sometimes been underhanded. When he was head of the NBA referees' union, he treated Earl Strom badly because the best official in NBA history had legitimate reasons to want to stay out of the union. Durwood Merrill in his book says that during negotiations Phillips throws chairs, breaks things, and generally acts like a psycho.

And I really don't like the way the union has treated former replacement umpires. During the 1979 strike, MLB went to its best minor league umps and gave them an ultimatum - come to the majors now as scabs or else you'll never see the majors. The umpires who did so were shunned by their peers. When they came back, the regular umpires refused to eat with them, they didn't talk to them personally, and they did little to back them up on the field. One of those replacements, Steve Fields, had his face cut by a foul ball once, and his partners wouldn't even leave their positions to help him. Derryl Cousins and John Shulock, the only two replacement umpires left, still get that treatment today. The players forgave and forgot the scab players, so why can't the scab umpires be forgiven after 20 years?

Still, Phillips has done a lot of good. Umpires used to work three months straight after the All-Star break; Phillips fought for and won in-season vacations for them, which saved a lot of marriages. Their benefits are much better than what they used to be. Most importantly, he fights for them. An umpire can make a tough call without worrying whether Peter Angelos is going to try to get him fired over it. And that's huge in a profession where integrity is everything.

You can currently find Dylan Bumbarger running through the streets of his Oregon town with his fists raised in the air, screaming, "We won the Memorial Cup! We won the Memorial Cup!" Most Americans might want to ask him what the Memorial Cup is at db@strikethree.com.