But reality is in the eyes of the beholders. While the baseball season will open late this month with real ballplayers on the field and real owners in the luxury boxes, the balls and strikes will most likely be called by replacement umpires. The owners have locked out major-league umps, whose contract expired Dec. 31, and replaced them with amateurs, including failed former pros. The dispute is - surprise! - over money, with the umpires, whose salaries ran from $60,000 to $175,000, seeking a 53 percent pay hike and the leagues looking to postpone any new agreement until next season. Robert Kheel, baseball’s lead negotiator, calls the union demands “unthinkable and totally inappropriate … Unless its appetite for excessive wage increases is revised, it is unlikely we’ll have an agreement before opening day.”
Last week the two sides met for the 24th time without significant progress. “The owners are sore,” says Richie Phillips, chief counsel for the umpires. “They took it on the chin against the players and now they’re picking on the smallest kid on the block.” Indeed the owners, having lost $700 million during the players’ strike, are unlikely to be generous. “The umpires have totally lost sight of reason,” says National League president Leonard Coleman.
Nobody has ever beaten Phillips, a Philadelphia attorney, with fast balls, and he dismisses rookie president Coleman, a former league marketing executive, as “a guy who’s used to selling T shirts trying to say what’s good for baseball.” But Phillips may have no answers to the curves already thrown by the new baseball season. While “a lot of players are disturbed by the fact that they have to be on the same field as scabs,” says the players union associate general counsel Gene Orza, the players themselves won’t be proffering more than verbal support. Umpires don’t sell tickets-and this year that may be the ultimate losing hand. “I’m scared,” umpire Rich Garcia, a 20-year veteran, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “They’re not taking any prisoners.”
The umpires aren’t the only ones braced for bad economic news. All but the very elite free agents can now expect low-ball offers. And the smallmarket teams, whose economic woes effectively halted the game for almost eight months, proved to everyone-most painfully to their own fans that they haven’t been crying wolf. Last week Montreal and Kansas City unloaded high-priced stars to rich ball clubs like the Yankees and the Cubs for low-paid prospects and hard cash. It was a needed reminder that until owners, players and umpires can all reach agreements, even so called real baseball will still seem more than a little unreal.
