ERR APPARENT

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Of course, that time, after Richie Phillips, lord of the umpires, advised his minions to resign, turned out to be extraordinarily brief, lasting only a day or two before a bloc of his constituents started to turn on him.

All the umpires have since asked for their resignations back but baseball has told 22 of them to forget it. Legal experts sneer at Phillips’ arguments. He has been vilified in the press as never before.

What can an embattled labor leader say but . . .

Oops?

“I misgauged the depth of the resolve of a large portion of the membership,” Phillips said, using more formal language last week from his Philadelphia office.

Of such miscalculations are routs made. Phillips is now fighting to save the 22 threatened careers but has lost all leverage on such issues as centralizing the umps under the commissioner’s office. Baseball, Phillips concedes, “has won a major, major, major, major battle.”

What happened was simple: As its counsel, Phillips built a union that increased the umpires’ pay from $17,500-$40,000 in 1978 to $75,000-$225,000, after which they were no longer poor and militant but prosperous and conservative.

There’s a story about a scorpion who gets a frog to ferry him across a river, promising not to sting him. Halfway across, the scorpion stings the frog, anyway.

“Why did you do that?” asks the frog. “Now we’ll both drown.”

“I can’t help it,” says the scorpion. “I’m a scorpion.”

Phillips couldn’t help it. That’s one thing everyone agrees upon, supporters and detractors. At 58, he’s still Richie Phillips.

Something similar happened with the NBA referees, the first officials’ union he created and led to prosperity--after which his members overthrew him.

“What happened with Richie was, we fired him,” says NBA referee Joey Crawford, a member of his union’s board of directors and brother of Jerry Crawford, president of the umpires’ union. “I voted to retain him.

“What Richie did was, he outpriced himself, is really what he did. There was a split vote on it. We owed him, like, $360,000 and we didn’t want to pay him. It was typical Richie--he sued us and won $560,000 [in a settlement].

“I thought in my personal, humble opinion, you need a guy like Richie when you’re a referee. The referee himself doesn’t want to be bothered by all the bull. Richie is a very, very aggressive guy and I believed at that time we needed somebody like that. Now I don’t think we need him.

“Most of our guys want a deal to be made. They want a dealmaker versus a person who is very, very--he likes being in the newspaper. That’s Richie.”

Labor Leaders Are Born, Not Made

Phillips showed his genius early, when he led the altar boys at Our Lady of Angels in West Philly on strike.

“I was the go-to guy,” says Phillips. “I was captain of the basketball team, captain of the baseball team, captain of the football team. I was the head of the Altar Boy Society. I was a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts. Whatever it was, I was that.

“We used to get tips for serving masses on Saturdays. It was a small Italian parish, we all knew one another, so they used to tip us pretty good, even in those days.

“This was like ‘53, I guess it was. Even in the afternoon each altar boy would get like a minimum five bucks and for a morning mass, a nuptial mass, 10 bucks. [Laughing] It was a joke around the parish, the Altar Boys Society was tough. If you didn’t come up with the envelope, we would drop hot incense on the bride’s feet.

“A new priest came into the parish and made us turn over all our tips to him. He would give us a dollar for every wedding that we served. He said that was to make sure everybody got something. Well, we didn’t like that.

“So they came to me and asked me to do something about it after a couple months of this. So I went to the priest and told him we didn’t like it and we wanted to keep our tips and we’ll worry about it, if anybody got stiffed, we would self-insure. We didn’t need him to insure us. And we told him we wanted a distribution of all the excess monies that he was holding.

“So what happened is, he got mad and threw me out of the rectory. Got me by the ear, escorted me out of the rectory and threw me out the door.

“So I went back and told the boys what happened and we decided we’d stop serving masses. So for like three days, the other priests in the parish, when they were serving masses, they had to pour their own water and they had to ring their own bells.

“I went home and told my mother and aunt what happened, when the priest threw me out the door, grabbed me by the ear, shook me and said, ‘You’re nothing but a ringleader, get out of here.’

“I was crying--’Father called me a ringleader!’

“My aunt says, ‘I’m going up there and I’ll give him a piece of my mind.’

“And my mother says, ‘Oh great. You know Richie’s a pain in the butt. I don’t blame Father for calling him that.’ ”

Phillips says negotiations with another priest--who was also his basketball coach--produced a settlement. Management dropped its insistence on using the tip money to buy cassocks, which the altar boys asserted was the parish’s responsibility. Labor got the tip money back and started serving at masses again.

After that, it was just a lot more of the same.

Phillips, also known as “The Bear,” attended Villanova on a football scholarship, went on to law school and joined the staff of Philadelphia district attorney Arlen Specter, who is now a senator.

However, Phillips then veered off in the direction of riches, becoming an NBA agent with a twist; he didn’t just represent players (Maurice Lucas, Chet Walker, Norm Van Lier, Joe Bryant, father of Kobe), but coaches (Gene Shue), assistant coaches (Jack McMahon), college coaches (Al McGuire, Jerry Tarkanian, Lou Henson), teams (76ers, Warriors, Kings) and finally referees.

Phillips insists everyone knew who else he was working for. It was part of his charm. He was confrontational but likable and without pretense, the kind of adversary you might hire yourself the next time around.

His fortune was assured. He had moved his wife, Ellen, and their four children into a renovated farm house on the toney Main Line in 1977 when the referees approached him.

It was a perfect fit. They were unorganized, but the referees, like the umpires, were confrontational guys, like policemen in demeanor. Phillips was the son and grandson of cops.

Under Phillips, the refs promptly struck the ’77 playoffs and got a deal that made them a lot better off--and Richie a labor leader for life.

His gig was soon terminated--he insists his problem was Darrell Garrettson, the union president who’d gone management as supervisor of officials--but by then Phillips had picked up the umpires, who were just as downtrodden but had far greater visibility.

He took the umps out in 1979--their only strike in his 21 years as their counsel, he notes--and reaped the whirlwind all over again.

“It was a long strike, from the start of the season to May 19,” he says. “Everybody said I was crazy. Everybody said, we had 52 umpires and we’ll find 52 guys who can umpire. And finally by the middle of May, the players were in revolt. . . .

“You have to understand the basic concept. Most people, when they go on strike, they close down the factory. They can impose economic stress on people. The umpires and referees can’t do that. They don’t close anything down. The players keep playing. The game goes on.

“The game just doesn’t go on as well. So if all your people are together, to bring in an enormous number of people, umpires or referees, to bring in 68 new umpires, the quality will suffer greatly. The players are the game but the umpires are part of that support cast that enable the players to function on the field to the best of their ability. A batter has to know which pitches he has to swing at and which he can be taking and a pitcher has to know, when I put a pitch here, I know it’s going to be called a strike.”

Of course, if all your people aren’t together. . . .

Going For Their Guns, Shooting Themselves

By the ’99 All-Star break, there were a lot of rumbles around--and the umpires didn’t like any of them.

They didn’t like talk of being centralized under the commissioner, especially the National League umps who liked the deal they had, with a president, Len Coleman, who was friendly with Phillips and a supervisor, Paul Runge, they liked.

The umps didn’t like new baseball honcho Sandy Alderson using club personnel to monitor their performance on calling high strikes.

Worse, they suspected baseball would stall all season, lock them out when it ended and fire lower-rated members in a draconian settlement intended as a warning shot across the bow of the players, whose contract is up in 2001.

Strike sentiment rang out on a June 30 conference call. On July 14, 57 umps met in Philadelphia where Phillips, noting their no-strike clause, suggested the resignation scenario, his attempt to seize the calendar, to threaten the 1999 post-season as the players had in 1994.

“They thought it was a great alternative,” says Phillips. “They said it was brilliant, it was creative, it was innovative. One guy said, ‘This was the kind of leadership that we expect from you, Richie, and only from you.’

“That guy was [AL umpire] Dave Phillips, no relation. And the same guy who got up and made a big speech about it being brilliant, innovative and creative and exemplifying the type leadership that they could get only from me--two days later, because he wanted to go out on a disability, he turned around. He was the first one to rescind.”

Soon a large block of AL umps rescinded. That was another problem and an ironic one.

The separate staffs Phillips had fought for produced separate psychologies. The NL leaders, like Crawford and Bruce Froemming, were fire-eaters. AL umps tended to be more accommodation-minded. And Phillips was closer to the NL guys.

Now, four-year contract or no four-year contract, Phillips’ position with his union looks untenable. He has lost control of the calendar and the situation. Now he’s just trying to repair the damage.

Friends say he was subdued but by the end of last week, his optimism had popped to the surface again. He was filing motions, doing interviews and predicting victory, at least in the sense of keeping the 22 threatened umps’ jobs. He was hopeful enough to detect signs of a thaw on the part of baseball.

“I’m strong enough to go through this and take the hits and take the hits and take the hits,” he said. “I told these guys on July 14 that what I was really doing was calling in the heavy artillery on my own position. [Laughing] I thought the artillery was going to be coming from the other side, from the media and baseball. I didn’t realize that the heavy artillery would be coming from my own people. . . .

“You just make sure the armor stays intact and the armor is intact. And that the treads stay on, and that we keep going.”

It used to be a thankless task but now, forget the number. Nevertheless, it’s still his task, for the moment, and he’s still going, a Bear on a hot tin roof.