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Make It Stop

Michael Cox

The fun never stops here at Baseballhead, where like FOX we've decided to feature a "Fan Cam." Anyone reading who has a QuickCam connected to their computer could appear on the page at any moment, but like FOX, we'll be leaning hard in favor of babies and the elderly.

Well well well. Things are not all chocolate pudding in umpireland this week, as it has been made official: The resignation-as-strike was a colossal failure.

The reasons were many, but all boiled down to the hard, cold fact: Fans, players and owners alike were lining up give the umps a kick in the ass to send them on their way. Although Richie Phillips will never own up to it, the backbreaker was not the 1/3 of the umps who knew this and hoped to try to appease MLB enough to keep their jobs, it was the fact that all Phillips' old-fashioned two-fisted bullying tactics couldn't coerce the minor-league umpires into refusing to replace his men.

Without the ability to force the big leagues to use beer-league umpires in their stead, our heroes had zero leverage and they knew it. In fact, Phillips was so upset about the whole thing that he didn't speak to the press for several days.

But when he did speak, it was his usual roar, this time accompanied by two things: 1) Formal submission to rescind the resignations of all his umpires, and 2) A lawsuit, the gist of which is to make a strike legal, even though it is verboten in the very agreement Phillips himself signed a few years ago. Tossed in are various allegations of payoffs (because it's gotta be the money) and potential refusal by MLB to pay severance (because potential refusal should be just as illegal as actual refusal).

It's a tangled web, and one we'll be hearing much of in the days to come. But here are a couple of hints that this bumpy road will continue for the Men in Blue:

- The judge assigned to the case is none other than Edmund Ludwig, who told the umps "no dice" when they tried to walk out over the Roberto Alomar incident in 1997.

- The first judicial decision made by Ludwig was to allow MLB to accept the resignations of the 22 umps they'd like to keep walking.

Unfortunately, this all means that we'll hear much more about this than we would have if the umps had just quit and the owners had let them go. That's bad. But if it results in better umpires, maybe I can hack it for a while longer. Let's just hope that a year from now we're not faced with Phillips trying to petition the Supreme Court to get his charges' jobs back.

Item: Ken Griffey Jr. says he won't re-sign with the Mariners unless they improve their flagging roster. He said this before the season started. He said it last year. Heck, he has said it almost every year now, but GM Woody Woodward seems to have told the team owners that Griffey's in the bag as long as they throw enough money at him.

The bad part about this is that Seattle will lose Griffey (and Alex Rodriguez as well). The good part is that it will finally get Woodward fired, no matter how he tries the "he never really wanted to sign anyway" spin that accompanied Randy Johnson's exit. As much as I'd like to see Woodward go (hey, the Dodgers will need someone soon), that's unacceptable collateral damage.

Item: Jim Abbott, the all-time greatest one-handed pitcher to ever play the game, retired this week after being released for the second time in his career (if that was a necessary criteria, Norm Charlton would have retired years ago). Although his career wasn't a long one, he had a no-hitter and the chance to play in New York, LA and Chicago before ending up in Milwaukee. By all accounts a class act, it's a shame he lost his touch so early.

Wow, I just re-read that and as long as I leave out the "one-handed" part, I can re-use it when Hideo Nomo retires...

Item: Albert Belle speaks! Perhaps it was the fact that his "cabbie salute" to the Balto faithful was close to the last straw for Peter "Boss Lite" Angelos, or just "in-your-face" euphoria over his three-homer performance, but Belle managed to stuff more posturing into one mic session than some stars do in a whole season.

Select gems:

About the fans -- "I'm disappointed it's come to a time when they boo me...And then to turn around and have the nerve to cheer for you, that's the way baseball goes." Sounds like his disdain for the fans is about the same as his hatred of the press. Nice job, Albert!

About the rumblings that the O's would like to get rid of him -- "The trade rumors are false. I'm not going anywhere." That's probably true, if only because nobody else is willing to take on such a salary for a player who has shown himself to be erratic since collecting the big paycheck.

And about his performance that day, which included an attempted refusal to take his base on a HBP so that he could try for another homer -- "I'm not going to get a hit every time in clutch situations, but over the course of the season I'll get a lot of clutch hits." The smart money's on the "in-your-face" theory, yessir.

All in all, a good start, but I'd recommend regular talks, so that we don't have to focus on dissecting the few gems we're left with. Perhaps a Scooby-Doo impression would help: "Rello, rellas! Ri'm rissed recause ri ruck rout, ro ruck roff" just sounds much more friendly, doesn't it?

about the author

Michael Cox has mounted a one-man campaign to hire wrestling referees to replace the departing umps. Explain that bench-clearing brawls would carry on unabated while the new umps are distracted by the batboy.