The Way I See It
WHEN umpire union boss Richie Phillips recently announced that his 68 people would quit on Sept. 2, there were outcries of "good riddance." Umpires are right
to cry foulOne headline over a column in a New York newspaper read: "Go ahead and walk, you porky chumps!"
Phillips, the firebrand champion of the umpires since 1979, is demanding self-governance for his association and more respect.
He's still steaming over the three-game suspension of National League umpire Tom Hallion for bumping a player, while bearing in mind the countless indignities umpires have borne from millionaire crybabies.
Baseball's leniency toward Roberto Alomar after his 1996 spitting incident still bothers Phillips like an old war wound.
Now maybe you'd expect me to say these umpires, whose salaries, benefits and working conditions have improved tremendously since Phillips (who sometimes acts like Conan the Barbarian) jumped into the fray, should shut up and be satisfied.
But I won't.
Their complaints about respect echo the basic plight of game officials everywhere.
In Hawaii, a bill to make it a crime to threaten or attack an official has never been given much consideration.
Respect for the people who keep order in the games we play is at an all-time low. Stories of harassment , assault, threats and sundry other abuses waged against officials from the youth level to the pros are just too common.
UMPIRES at the Major League level make plenty of bad calls. But the pressure they feel when they screw up is unlike anything you or I could imagine. A fellow umpire said Richie Garcia sat and cried in the locker room after he realized he'd made the wrong call on that home run ball at Yankee Stadium in the 1996 American League championship series.
And I don't care if today's umpires are making $75,000 to $225,000. I don't care if their skins are as thick as cowhide. What these guys put up with on the field is cruel and unusual punishment in our sports culture.
Baseball tolerates extremely close confrontations between umpires and managers and players. How many times have you seen a manager snarling like a rabid pit bull while he is literally nose-to-nose with an umpire?
They don't get that close in other sports.
The umpires, who have no way to control the temperament of a game except through ejection, are also facing a baseball trend toward the Jerry Springer Show.
Because they lack the penalties that NBA and NFL refs have (such as awarding fouls and free throws or taking away yardage), they're basically just sitting atop a volcano every day.
There's no way an umpire can tell a manager that the count is going to jump from 0-1 to 0-2 if he doesn't shut up and get back into his dugout.
The owners haven't offered umpires much help in curbing benches-clearing brawls - either because they don't know how or they see them as an answer to young America's increasing taste for violence in entertainment. After all, the young are the future of the game.
Durwood Merrill wrote a book called, "You're Out, and You're Ugly." In it, he pleaded the case of umpires in exquisitely simple language:
"...because we've been yelled at, screamed at, and called everything from gutter rot to horse manure, we stick together."
Pat Bigold has covered sports for daily newspapers
in Hawaii and Massachusetts since 1978.