An old American League umpire named Ed Runge once described his profession as "the only occupation where a man has to be perfect on the first day on the job and then improve over the years."

If memory serves, it was also Runge who found himself embroiled in a heated argument with a hitter he had just called out on strikes. When the player finally punctuated his disgust by tossing his bat high into the air, the umpire eyed him levelly and calmly and said: "If that thing comes down, you're out of here!"

The baseball umpires might have reflected on the inevitability of that situation and applied it to their own before making a dramatic and, retrospectively, precipitate gesture earlier this summer. On July 14th, one day after the midsummer All-Star game, the major league umpires met in Philadelphia and, at the urging of their union's executive director Richie Phillips, voted to submit letters of resignation in an effort to kick-start talks on a new bargaining agreement to replace a contract due to expire on December 31st.

The tactic presumed several things. First of all, it made the assumption that the umpires were somehow irreplaceable, and secondly, it assumed that the brethren would maintain solidarity within their ranks in the crisis they had just precipitated.

If recent American labour history has demonstrated nothing else, it has shown us the folly of the first presumption. God knows no one should be more irreplaceable than an Air Traffic Controller, but when the nation's ATC union staged what was adjudged to have been an illegal strike almost two decades ago, then-President Ronald Reagan ordered them all fired and the union disbanded. Today, Washington's National Airport has been renamed for Ronald Reagan and, to this day, 11,000 Air Traffic Controllers are STILL out of work.

Within days of the Philadelphia meeting, 56 of the 68 umpires duly submitted their resignations, effective September 2nd - meaning that 12 of them did not. Within days, the dirty dozen were joined by 14 more umpires who hastily reconsidered their position and rescinded their resignations. As it became clear that the strategy was going to backfire, even the hard-liners began to retreat, but in the offices of Major League Baseball, Commissioner Bud Selig's chief deputy Sandy Alterson provided a portent of what was to come when he expressed his view that the mass-resignation campaign was "either a threat to be ignored, or an offer to be accepted."

Ultimately the resignations of nine American League and 13 National League umpires were accepted, and 25 new replacements promoted from the minor leagues. The union went to court, seeking an injunction that would have allowed them to take back the resignations, only to be rebuffed by a federal judge. And as of last Thursday, 22 veteran umpires were out of work.

In deciding which resignations to accept, the lords of baseball clearly did not allow themselves to be distracted by matters such as competence.

Richie Garcia, one of the newly-unemployed arbiters, was, for instance, one of the more respected members of his profession. In their annual survey rating umpires' performances, the baseball players themselves had rated Garcia the third-best umpire in the game. Another umpire whose resignation was accepted, Drew Coble, was ranked sixth.

Clearly, there is room for considerable finger-pointing, beginning with the dissidents who doomed the strategy by failing to go along with their brethren union members.

"If the guys don't stick together, I don't care what kind of time you've got, it's not going to work," Garcia had prophetically warned earlier on in the dispute. "I'm 100 per cent behind Richie Phillips. He got us here. He got us everything we have. He's been loyal to us for 22 years. It's a shame the guys aren't loyal toward him." "They turned their backs on us," fumed Bruce Froemming, a senior National League umpire who was in part responsible for hiring Phillips back in 1979. "Obviously they think they're going to get a better deal somewhere else."

Indeed, a number of the breakaway umpires have already threatened to seek recognition for a separate union they intend to organise. All of which would seem to call into question the future of Phillips.

In his two-decade reign as their bargaining representative, Phillips had made undreamed-of gains for the umpires, including the $1.36 million severance package that accompanied last week's resignations.

At a meeting last spring, Phillips was rehired (by a 29-14 vote) and given a new five-year contract, but given the enormity with which his most recent strategy backfired, it is unclear that he is the man the surviving umpires want negotiating their new agreement.

"You need solidarity," said National League umpire Angel Hernandez. "I'm sure there will be turmoil down the road."