Listening to our local sports talk station yesterday, and didn't realize that the current crop of ML umpires are "scabs", being hired after MLB fired everybody that went on strike.
@DCPatriot It wasn't exactly a strike. I remember it only too well; it happened in 1999. It was a ploy dreamed up by the late executive director of the old Major League
Umpires Association, Richie Phillips, while he was trying to strong-arm baseball government into immunising umpires from accountability on the job.
Two things led to the ploy: 1) Umpire Tom Hallion was suspended for bumping Colorado pitcher Jeff Reed earlier that season, and Phillips and some umps
took offense to the suspension. (Which should make you wonder how much blue murder the umps would have screamed if a player had bumped an ump
but wasn't suspended for it.) 2) Baseball government's moves toward more umpire accountability that year included a survey taken of players, managers,
coaches, and executives rating umpires' performances. Sandy Alderson---now the Mets' general manager, then working in the commissioner's office---
said publicly, "I got worried when I found out that [team personnel] were more concerned with who was umpiring the next day than they were about who
was pitching."
To Phillips those things amounted to "humiliating" and "degrading" the umpires. He also thumped publicly about equating umpires to federal judges: "I don't
believe they should always be subject to the voter, just like federal judges are not subject to the voter." When Alderson rejoined that federal judges can be
impeached, Phillips hit the proverbial ceiling.
Phillips announced the resignations of 57 of baseball's 66 major league umpires on July 14, 1999. "[T]hey want to feel good about themselves and would
rather not continue as umpires if they have to continue under present circumstances," Phillips fumed. "They feel, in the past seven months or so, they have
been humiliated and denigrated."
In essence, Phillips — who died in 2013 — sought to proclaim and consecrate major league umpires as laws unto themselves. When the commissioner's office
asked teams to chart pitches and file reports on individual umpires' strike zones, Phillips denounced the request as "just another case of Big Brother watching
over us."
The mass resignations were in truth a bid to end-run the no-strike clause in the umpires' labour agreement with Major League Baseball. And Phillips announced
concurrently that the umpires would be employed by a new body called Umpires, Inc., who would negotiate to provide major league umpires and would also be
the sole supervisor of the arbiters as well as the first and final caller on who'd be assigned to which games.
"To owners and players alike," observed the Society for American Baseball Research analyst Doug Pappas, may he, too, rest in peace, "this demand was tantamount
to a municipal police union demanding an end to civilian control of a police force." And the ploy backfired drastically.
Alderson had one answer to the mass resignations: they were "either a threat to be ignored or an offer to be accepted." The commissioner's office accepted the offer,
and a few of the umps, after consulting their personal lawyers, yanked their resignations back fast.
Then a group of dissenting American League umps, with John Hirschbeck and Joe Brinkman leading them, denounced Phillips publicly and urging their colleagues to
do likewise. Near the end of July 1999, baseball hired 25 minor league umps all of whom had major league experience filling in for umps on their mid-year vacations.
Shortly after that, then-American League president Gene Budig (then-commissioner Bud Selig hadn't yet folded the individual league offices) said nine American League
umps who hadn't rescinded their resignations would lose their jobs come September 2. Those nine and 33 National League umps withdrew their resignations. Alas,
the league said they had only 20 openings.
Hirschbeck and Brinkman then helped form the new World Umpires Association, after the arbiters first decertified the MLUA by an almost 2-to-1 margin. The WUA
negotiated and got many of the umps who walked off Phillips's cliff re-hired; the MLUA continued representing many of the resigners. (The late Ken Kaiser, who
passed away last year, was among the ones who missed when MLB rehired half the terminated. The aforementioned Tom Hallion was re-hired at last in 2005, and
he found himself fined heavily enough after an incident with then-Tampa Bay pitcher David Price, when Price showed his frustration on the mound over a bad call
and Hallion ordered him to, and I quote, throw the f--king ball over the plate.)
Unfortunately, umpire accountability remains a dicey subject.
Poll
