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Obviously, we haven't heard the last of the Milton Bradley-Mike Winters-Bud Black story. Much testimony will be taken, many denials made, many words forgotten and imagined. Mike Cameron is a thoughtful man, and says the confrontation could have been avoided. "I don't think umpires should get emotionally involved," he said. "That is Milton's office just as much as it's Mike Winters' office. You can't get your work done if there's always confrontation. As much as we say he is a guy prone to sensitive situations, I might have done the same thing," Cameron said about Bradley.
Cameron is absolutely right: Umpires should not get emotionally involved. But that's a little easier said than done, right? Plus, umpires are taught to get emotionally involved. Way back in umpire school, they're taught to respond to aggression with aggression; anything short of that, and the millionaires will walk all over them. As Pam Postema wrote in her memoirs, "If you can't swear, you can't umpire. It's as simple as that." In the old days, players and umpires occasionally would resort to fisticuffs. Today that's not acceptable, so instead they resort to profanity, and most umpires can give as good as they get. Especially the veterans, and this is Winters' 20th season in the majors. Major League Baseball should conduct a vigorous investigation, if only because the incident might have a measurable impact on a pennant race, and certainly will have a measurable impact on Milton Bradley's career. But unless Winters said something specific about Bradley's ethnicity -- coach Bobby Meacham says he did (I don't believe him) -- there's not much MLB can do, save perhaps a slap on the wrist. If Bradley was insulting Winters, he was going to be insulted back. That's how it's always been, and how it always will be.
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