By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/08/23/methinks-thou-didst-protest-not-enough/So much for
that protest. Major league umpires took to white wristbands last Saturday,
protesting Tigers infielder Ian Kinsler’s public rip of umpire Angel Hernandez, proclaiming
they’d wear the white bands until baseball government addressed if not cracked down on
verbal abuse from players. The protest lasted all of one day. The core issues won’t go away
that fast.
Ejected early last week for arguing pitch calls with Hernandez, Kinsler told Hernandez to his
face he was doing a horrible job, then continued his criticisms in on-the-record interviews.
Those got him fined ten large by baseball government. The wristband protest also inspired
baseball government to advise the World Umpires Association any further protest, wristband
or otherwise, would lighten its membership in the bank accounts, too.The WUA got themselves
a sit-down or two with baseball government in the wake of the protest, presumably to vent
their grievances over players treating them with less than unquestioning respect. Here’s
hoping neither they nor anyone else makes the mistake of thinking either Kinsler’s public
rip or the umpires’ protest was unprecedented, either.
In late September 1949, after a close play at the plate helped cost the Yankees a critical game
with the Red Sox as both drove toward the pennant the Yankees won, young Yankee outfielder
Cliff Mapes confronted plate umpire Bill Grieve—who’d done his best to avoid ejections after
backup catcher Ralph Houk went nuclear over Johnny Pesky beating a tag at the plate—and
demanded, “How much did you bet on the game, you son of a bitch?”
Almost half a century later, umpire Tom Hallion inadvertently bumped Rockies catcher Jeff
Reed when trying to settle a hash with pitcher Mike DeJean. Hallion was suspended three
games and the then-Major League Umpires Association was publicly outraged—though not
as much so as they’d have been if a player accidentally bumped an ump and got nothing
much more than a slap on the proverbial wrist.
Three years before Hallion’s bump, John Hirschbeck and Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar
tangled over an outside pitch Hirschbeck called a strike, leading to a verbal kerfuffle (Alomar
was turning back to his dugout, saying only, “Just pay attention to the game,” when Hirsch-
beck ejected him), leading to two men acting completely out of character, with Hirschbeck
calling Alomar a twelve-letter euphemism for maternal fornicator that gets people assaulted
at minimum in Latino communities, and Alomar spitting toward the ump in outrage in reply.
Alomar was suspended five games, to be served the following season.No one excuses him
to this day (he certainly doesn’t), but Hirschbeck got nothing for provoking it. But in due
course the two men patched it up, especially after Hirschbeck asked the Indians’ clubhouse
supervisor (Alomar became an Indian two years later) what Alomar was really like, and the
supervisor, Jack Efta, stunned the ump by saying, “He’s one of the two nicest people I’ve
ever met here. And you’re the other one.”
Joe West thought he was only giving Adrian Beltre the needle when he told USA Today in
June he thought Beltre was baseball’s biggest complainer. Baseball government was so
amused it suspended West three games . . . two months later. West has a reputation for
trying to make himself the center of the games he works but at least the man has a sense
of humour. Or did, until his own little funny got him three unpaid days off.
In the interim, Beltre thought he’d have a little fun when plate umpire Gerry Davis ordered
him to stand in, not adjacent to the on-deck circle. Beltre simply moved the big round
Rangers logo covering the circle over to where he preferred to stand. Davis ejected Beltre
post haste and suffered the wrath of the tweets for his lack of fun. Wonder if the umps
will protest when the Rangers hand fans small replicas of the on-deck circle logo.
Don’t fool yourselves that things were better in the so-called good old days when everyone
respected authority without question and players knew their place. Not when Babe Ruth
argued a call with umpire Brick Owens by punching Owens in the face. Not when John McGraw
punched umpire Bill Byron in the jaw after a game. Kinsler ripping Hernandez for
incompetence in the press isn’t exactly in that league.
When the former MLUA’s director Richie Phillips masterminded the mass resignation “strategy”
that ended up destroying his union and costing a few umps their careers in 1999—not to
mention leading to the formation of the WUA (John Hirschbeck, one of the dissenters from
the mass resignations, became a key mover in founding the WUA)—one of his arguments
was that the umps “want to feel good about themselves and would rather not continue as
umpires if they have to continue under present circumstances. They feel, in the past seven
months or so, they have been humiliated and denigrated.”
The humiliation and denigration ranged from the Hallion suspension to baseball government’s
bid to exercise oversight regarding umpire performances. The horror: an employer asking
for employee oversight. (Phillips sneered back that it was just another exercise of Big Brother.)
Then-commissioner’s office executive Sandy Alderson said, pointedly enough, “I got worried
when I found out players were more concerned with who was umpiring the next day than
they were about who was pitching.”
Nobody disputes that high-salaried professional athletes are responsible for behaving, well,
professionally. The flip side to that record (yes I just betrayed my age) is that umpires,
who are established more or less as baseball’s on-field judicial branch (Phillips once equated
umpires to federal judges—on behalf of their having life tenure and immunity from critique)
are responsible for behaving like the grownups in the room.
West wasn’t exactly the grownup in the room three years ago, when he shoved Jonathan
Papelbon, then a Phillies reliever, after Papelbon gave the Philadelphia boo birds a grab of
his crotch at the end of a hard inning. West ejected Papelbon appropriately enough, but he
got only one game’s suspension for grabbing Papelbon and Papelbon got eight games off.
If it had been Papelbon grabbing West and getting only one unpaid game off, the umpires
would have had cows over it.
Let’s not forget, too, that for what seemed ages you could pick up your newspaper or flip
on the broadcast news or hit the Internet and learn more and faster of a player’s discipline
over an argument with an umpire, but almost never, never mind slower, of whether an
umpire was disciplined for instigating an incident with a player. Hallion vs. Reed, West vs.
Papelbon, and West vs. Beltre continue to be exceptions.
Players aren’t a hundred percent innocent, but neither do they have the field authority to
exercise correction if an umpire blows a call. They have only their easily-enough-exercised
verbal skills. (A.J. Pierzynski, then a White Sox catcher, to plate umpire Quinn Woolcott:
“Give me a new ball, one you can see.” Yes, Pierzynski was ejected.) Most umpires let the
players and managers blow off their steam so long as it doesn’t devolve to coarse obscenities.
It was once said the main reason American League umpires took more crap from Yogi Berra
than anyone else was that the Hall of Famer didn’t use profane language.
The best news about the WUA’s white-wristband protest: It showed the best side of their
presumed maturity and, while they were at it, though few may have seen it this way at the
time, they showed the nation you can air your grievances—whatever their merits—with
effect and without starting a riot. But they protested Kinsler speaking on the public record
against one umpire’s performance without seeming to think, even once, that there was
something amiss about Kinsler being fined five figures for it.
You understand their protest when West was suspended over his Beltre barb, and you
wouldn’t have wanted to be in their house if West had been fined ten large for it. But you
bear in mind that umpires are and must be presumed impartial. Even the slightest
appearance of impartiality poses possible consequences more grave in a baseball game
than the slightest barb from a player toward an umpire who makes a questionable call.
Let’s accept for argument’s sake the conceit, accepted by some umpires and their one-
time union chief, that umpires are baseball’s version of federal judges. Allowing that,
isn’t there something very troubling about a player being punished over that for which
the lowliest American citizen can’t be punished?
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