ARE THE UMPIRES OFF-BASE?

I bravely crept into the umpire’s dressing room at Edison Field the other day, searching for sloppy fat guys.

“I’m not sure we can help you,” slim Joe Brinkman said with a smile. “But I used to be 30 pounds heavier until this new diet. Does that count?”

I boldly walked into the heart of the evil empire looking for someone to taunt me into bumping them.

“You know, I really love this game,” Dale Scott said. “Since I was in Little League, I’ve loved this game. I’ve always wanted to be a part of it.”

I courageously stepped into baseball’s version of a La-Z-Boy, scouring for somebody asleep on a Cheeto.

“Watch how this guy works the plate,” said Derryl Cousins, studying a game on TV. “You can sometimes pick up things this way.”

I departed the delightful company of the most hated men in sports while pondering what most longtime baseball people know, but are afraid to admit.

Kill the umps?

Then kill the rest of the season.

The umpires were arrogantly misguided in threatening to resign on Sept. 2 if they are not given a new union contract.

But baseball officials would be just as arrogant and misguided if they don’t pay attention.

As the angry reaction to the umpires’ foolish ultimatum proves, the fans dismiss them, the players dislike them, and their own bosses disavow them.

In many cases, this is only because they don’t understand them.

And everyone quietly knows, in no scenario can there be a pennant race without them.

Allowing September to proceed with minor league and college umpires would be like treating baseball’s integrity with a loogie to the face.

Remember the last time something like this happened? The beginning of the 1995 season? The umpires were locked out? Replacements were used?

It lasted a week, during which time managers Tom Lasorda, Cito Gaston and Jim Fregosi were ejected from games while there were dozens of other confrontations nightly.

This would happen again, only with the heat turned higher, the national embarrassment greater.

This would happen again, because of the one thing that only players and umpires truly understand.

It’s not about rules, it’s about respect.

With their livelihoods on the line, the players will take advantage of anyone they don’t respect.

They will use intimidation to get a strike call. They will use the threat of an ugly argument to get a safe call.

The game’s honor rests on an umpire’s ability to gain that respect.

Good or bad--and some current umpires are absolutely awful--they are often confrontational because it is the only way some million-dollar players will listen.

And the players do listen. Which is something they would not do with a replacement umpire.

There is an unnoticed ritual that occurs before every series. As the umpires walk to home plate to start the first game, the players walk to the dugout steps to check them out.

If they see any umpire without a number--a rookie umpire replacing a vacationing umpire--they turn to the young guys on the team to find out about his minor league days.

Then they start the needle.

The game sometimes turns on that needle.

“I saw it happen just a couple of a months ago, we had a new guy behind home plate, and by the second inning, it was terrible,” Cousins recalled. “Batters glared at him. Catchers held the ball on him. Every call was questioned.”

Imagine this scenario in the most important games of the season. Imagine the chaos.

Back in 1995, Angel General Manager Bill Bavasi took one look at the replacement umpiring and said, “It compromises the integrity of the game.”

Not much has changed since then.

The umpires are more confrontational, but often because they have to be.

Why is it that fans applaud managers who bench misbehaving players, and owners who suspend them, and leagues for fining them . . . yet they boo umpires who won’t let those same players scream in their faces?

Why is the sight of a middle-aged man running out of a dugout and cursing an umpire considered part of baseball tradition . . . while the umpire who curses back is the spoiler of tradition?

The owners with their salary wars and small-market death marches have shown that they care little about the ethics of the game.

The players with their corked bats and scuffed pitches and gamesmanship have shown that they don’t care much more.

So the maintenance of this tiny five-letter word called “honor” is left to the umpire.

And you wonder why he yells?

Angry fans are wondering a lot of things about the umpires these days.

“I knew there was some dislike for us, but I had no idea,” Brinkman said. “The amount of stuff that has come out against it . . . it is all so personal.”

And so impersonal. According to Brinkman, my visit to the umpires’ dressing room marked the first time his crew had been questioned by the media in eight years.

If fans and officials would just look a little closer, here’s what they might find:

* The majority of the 68 umpires are very good, maybe the best of all sports officials.

If you were going to immediately demote the bad ones to the minor leagues--which is one of the things the commissioner’s office would probably do if it gained control of the union--only about 10 would go.

Replays show it, tapes prove it, and stories don’t lie.

Jason Reid, The Times’ prolific Dodger beat writer, has written 674 baseball accounts in the last two years.

Only 23 of those stories have contained the word, “umpire.”

“They show our arguments on TV, over and over, and everybody thinks it happens every day,” Scott said. “Most of the time, you don’t know we are there.”

* The majority of the umpires are in good shape.

A handful are truly obese and should be replaced, but less than 30% weigh more than 225 pounds, and nightly they are on the field twice as long as any player.

“Where on earth do they get that fat and out-of-shape stuff?” Brinkman said. “We are not the same guys who umpire those softball games down the street.”

Earlier this year, Yankee catcher Jorge Posada ripped umpire Greg Kosc for leaving a game with heat exhaustion. Not coincidentally, this was after Kosc had called him out on strikes.

Interesting, a couple of days later, Posada excused himself from a hot game for what were reportedly similar reasons.

* The majority of the umpires care about their work.

When Tom Hallion was recently suspended for three games by the National League for confrontational behavior--a landmark move that should be repeated--he accepted his punishment in a very unplayerlike fashion.

“If they look at two years of tapes on guys, and they aren’t doing the job, then they should be sent out,” Brinkman said. “We just don’t want them doing it arbitrarily, because somebody doesn’t like us.”

Now that it is clear nobody likes them, they need to make some changes.

Starting with buying out the contract of heavy-footed leader Richie Phillips and hiring someone who understands negotiating tactics and tact.

The problem here is not the message--like anyone, they want to negotiate a deal when they have leverage--but the way it was delivered.

And forget this business about being their own corporation. Everything in this game needs checks and balances. They shouldn’t be afraid to let the commissioner’s office supervise them. The bosses will see how good they really are.

Next, they should stop being offended by the little player smirks and gripes that nobody sees but the player and the umpire. What the umpire often thinks embarrass him would not even be noticed if he didn’t take off his mask and start screaming about it.

The rest of the solution to this perception problem is up to the fans and officials, to look closer, to judge more carefully.

Early Friday night, while umpiring third base in the game between the Dodgers and Angels, Brinkman picked up a foul ball. He started to throw it in the stands, but stopped, the Edison Field crowd erupted in boos.

The fans were silent a few minutes later, after the inning, when Barnett felt it safe enough to walk over to the stands and hand the ball to a smiling little girl.

The umpire made the right call, and nobody saw it. They never do.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.