Phillips: A Boy Named Sue

Derek Zumsteg

Today the MLB umpires sued the owners in what has got to be the stupidest lawsuit I've heard of in some time. Highlights and demands:

• That the umpires be allowed to rescind their resignations
• MLB intended to withhold their ludicrous termination pay
• That mass resignation was a valid form of strike
• Baseball's offering incentives to join a dissident umpire faction

Ignore for a minute that this is a classic bizarro-world Darryl Strawberry-type defense ("It wasn't my car or my twenty with the coke in it, and I was joking about sex with the plainclothes officer and I'm not really Darryl Strawberry "). Let's look at this from our standpoint:

Sandy Alderson, who has deftly let umpires' union head Richie Phillips do everything but shoot himself, should happily accept the umps' resignations and not allow them to rescind them. You do not, in the normal workplace the rest of us toil in, have the right to quit and then change your mind. Your boss is free to tell you that you can't un-quit. MLB has already gone ahead and hired some replacement umps. Great! Keep 'em! I believe that the MLB umpires should be replaced as follows:

• One-third good minor-league umps
• One-third imported Cuban super-umps
• One-third cyborg umps

This is MLB's chance to rebuild the umpiring the way it should be. I don't expect umpires to be perfect -- I don't think anyone does. But a system where the terrible, the belligerent, and the blind rule like kings, impervious to all retribution, is a system that must be rebuilt. Maybe Alderson could be generous and let the best umps come back under a new collective agreement.

But he doesn't have to. The next point is that MLB was going to withhold their termination pay. This is without merit at this point, but consider this: the umpires basically wanted to stop the season, collect tons and tons of money in termination pay, form Richie Phillips Inc., and then get hired back -- at a hefty ransom.

If I tried to do this at work AT&T would win a summary judgment so quickly it would knock the wind out of me. If all the concessionaires decided to quit just before the world series to form their own contracting company and get higher rates, they would all be fired instantly and replaced. That MLB didn't do so when Richie Phillips first opened his moron-mouth is a credit to their amazingly deft hand in this dispute (is this the same MLB I slag the rest of the season? Really?). The umpires have no right to abuse the spirit of their contract guarantees so they can blackmail baseball out of more money.

Next, they're saying that the mass resignation is a valid form of a strike, and thus is protected by law. But understand this: the umpires cannot strike. It's in their contract. They made a deal, which was that if they had a dispute with their contract, they would re-negotiate, sue, whatever -- but they said they would not strike. I believe in the power of the strike and the sanctity of the picket line, but if you make that deal, it's your own funeral.

So if the mass resignations are a valid form of a strike, they're breaking their contract with MLB. And how do they expect to break their contract, admit they're breaking it, and still collect the contractual termination pay and bennies? You can't wipe your immense butt with a contract and then act outraged that someone's thinking about violating its spirit.

And last, they're claiming that MLB is offering big $$$ to umpires who join a dissident faction of the umpires. While I personally support this idea -- I'd love to see one-tenth of umps dressed in camouflage, armed, and passing out pro-Cuba literature -- this is the thinnest of the thin lot (a foreign concept to the umps, of course).

The fact of the matter is this: the umpire's union has failed, because it was colossally stupid. Richie Phillips is colossally stupid. And Sandy Alderson, a cool cat from the very start of this season, has let everything fall apart so that MLB can put everything back together the way it should be.

Here's hoping that includes a reasonable strike zone.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg paid a hefty sum to be the first man to ride Safeco Field's retractable roof. Let him know he shouldn't have been sucked in by hype of "almost one G in thrilling downward force" at dmz@strikethree.com.