King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Milton Bradley's crazy, but what's that ump's excuse? If Mike Winters baited the outfielder as Bradley and others say, he should be fired.

Editor's note: Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that the commissioner's office has suspended Mike Winters for the remainder of the season.

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Sept. 26, 2007 | This has been a really bad year for officials.

Hot on the heels of various overseas soccer scandals in the last few years, we've had the Joey Crawford nonsense and the Tim Donaghy affair in the NBA, the latter to date the granddaddy of U.S. officiating scandals, as well as the ongoing randomness of that league's refereeing and the timid middle management of the NFL's candy-stripers.

And now we have what looks like a mess involving baseball umpire Mike Winters.

It's not that what Winters is accused of doing is anywhere near as bad as Donaghy's game-fixing. It's just that when you have an incident in which Milton Bradley, who is almost certainly the craziest, least impulse-controlling player in baseball, tears his ACL while being physically restrained by his manager from going after an umpire, and there's even a ghost of a possibility that someone other than Bradley could be the bad guy in the incident, that someone else must really be a pip.

Winters is that someone else.

You've probably seen the video of Sunday's incident by now. When Bradley came to bat in the eighth inning, home-plate umpire Brian Runge asked Bradley if he'd thrown his bat at him following a called third strike in his previous at-bat. Bradley said no and asked if first-base umpire Winters had told Runge that. The two agree on all that.

Runge told the Associated Press that he said no, Winters hadn't said anything to him, that he believed Bradley and that Bradley should calm down. Bradley singled and, after reaching first, began jawing with Winters, who walked toward Bradley to engage in the argument. At one point, first-base coach Bobby Meacham left his coach's box and walked up the first-base line toward Winters, just as Bradley called timeout and approached the umpire angrily.

Manager Bud Black raced out of the dugout to restrain the volatile Bradley, wrestling him to the ground and injuring Bradley's knee in the process. Bradley's out for the season and the playoffs, on the off chance that his San Diego Padres, now tied for the wild-card spot and missing their best hitter, qualify.

So it sounds like Crazy Old Milton again, the guy who wore out his welcome in Cleveland, Los Angeles and Oakland with his temper and his antics, not to mention the fragility that's landed him on the disabled list a dozen times, and it was.

Whatever Winters said -- and we'll get to that -- Bradley simply couldn't afford to once again let his emotions get the better of him. He couldn't afford to get thrown out of Sunday's game, an eventual 7-3 loss to the Colorado Rockies that completed a three-game sweep, much less risk a suspension or get involved in a tussle with his manager that could get him hurt.

And before you say nobody could have foreseen the once-in-a-lifetime injury Bradley incurred Sunday, remember that this is Milton Bradley, who can get hurt brushing his teeth.

Next page: What did Winters say and, more important, why did he say it?