Last Call for the Umpires : With careers ending in tears, it’s baseball fans who will be feeling blue during the most important games.

A bang-bang play if there ever was one, three veteran umpires stepped on a major league field Wednesday afternoon at the precise time their career there was ending.

They knew it, but they stepped on it anyway.

They did not acknowledge the cameras. They did not look into the curious crowd.

Their futures swirled around them like empty hot dog wrappers, but they did not twitch, did not turn, moved directly to their positions as if this last game was their first.

Tom Hallion to second base. Bill Hohn to third base. Terry Tata behind the plate.

A combined 52 years of umpiring experience.

A combined 15 World Series and playoff series appearances.

Three sitting ducks.

As the Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers began playing in front of them, the announcement was being made behind them.

Those resignations they and 19 others dumbly offered as a negotiating ploy and did not rescind in time? Officially accepted.

Their assignment during the most critical part of the baseball season? Go home.

But not yet.

“We had a game to do,” Hallion said.

Eric Young dropped the ball at second base on a double-play throw. Hallion calmly made the right decision by ruling the runner out.

Raul Mondesi became angry and threw up his arms when called out on strikes. An unflinching Tata refused to be suckered into an argument.

Young slid into third base just under a tag by Jeff Cirillo, and Manager Jim Lefebvre ran out to gripe. But Hohn made the right call, and Lefebvre left quietly.

For the three hours and five minutes to took for the Brewers to defeat the Dodgers, 5-4, the three umpires stood strong and silent and invisible.

And then they didn’t.

“My heart is broken,” Hohn said afterward, slumped in front of cameras, eyes reddening.

“It’s not only broken my heart,” said Hallion, slumped beside him. “It has devastated me as an individual.”

Everyone knows what it is like to see an umpire scream.

Some of us now know what it is like to see an umpire cry.

“I just want to go home and be with my family,” said Hallion, breaking down.

“I love baseball,” Hohn said. “But right now, I hate baseball.”

The past national pastime has once again come up with something to hate.

The umpires were fools for following the deplorable union boss Richie Phillips in one of the worst bargaining strategies since 4-year-olds learned to hold their breaths.

“It was a mistake,” Hohn admitted.

But now that it is recognized as such, Commissioner Bud Selig is a bigger fool for making every baseball fan pay for it.

And believe me, when 25 inexperienced minor league umpires show up today to officiate the most important weeks of the season, it is we who will pay for that mistake.

“My God, we’re good people,” Hohn said. “We’re the integrity of the game.”

But these days in the commissioners’ office, integrity is apparently being treated as a nasty nine-letter word, far less important than the seven-letter gem known as revenge.

Baseball’s supposed intellects can’t get over their blind anger at Phillips’ stunt long enough to admit the only thing more dangerous in a pennant race than a rookie closer is a rookie umpire.

Every time the league has tried replacements, usually earlier in the season, there has been trouble. Now that it is September, there will be trouble squared.

That dropped ball by Young at second base? If this is a pennant race, and that umpire is a rookie, then runner Jeromy Burnitz is chasing him all over the field.

That called third strike on Mondesi? Let’s see how Paul O’Neill handles the same situation in three weeks in New York.

And if you thought Lefebvre was mad when he ran out to confront Hohn at third base, here’s betting Bobby Valentine will not survive September without punching somebody.

It is only natural that soon, these umpires will be thinking less about protecting honor and more about saving face. And their calls might reflect that.

“It’s going to be tough,” said the Dodgers’ Davey Johnson, who has managed with replacement umpires before. “It’s going to be a learning experience for the pitchers. And a learning experience for the hitters.”

The only thing both sides will know for sure is that the pendulum of authority has dramatically swung.

The players and managers are the bosses now, and will be until the new umpires can gain respect, which probably won’t happen until at least next year’s pennant race.

“You come into this league, you don’t just all of a sudden get accepted,” Hohn said. “Can 25 new guys come in and get a pennant race and handle the heat? Well, baseball thinks they can do it.”

Not all of baseball’s thoughts are so silly.

Selig wants to make the umpires more accountable, less confrontational. He wants to regain control of a group that has become too fat and happy under union leader Phillips.

A good idea, but a terrible time to try it.

Why couldn’t Selig reinstate the umpires until the off-season, then figure out a way to get rid of the dozen or so lousy ones then?

Why decide to remodel your house in the middle of your annual party?

It is almost as if baseball, having danced around the umpires’ prone bodies for two months, is now applying one last kick just for the fun of it.

Years of feeling bullied into giving raises and benefits, all packed into one kick.

Yet it is the fans who will feel it in the gut.

The umpires are most angry at their 35 umpiring brethren who rescinded their resignations and cut off their bargaining legs--”They all lied to us; they stabbed us in the back and kept shoving it in,” Hohn said--but this anger is misplaced.

For every resigned umpire who is openly worried about taking care of his family, there is a rescinded umpire who was worried about the same thing.

This is not about the misguided union.

This is about the bosses who should know better.

The one constant in the turmoil of Wednesday night was that, true to an unwritten pledge followed for a combined 52 years by three embattled men in blue, you did not notice the umpires.

Today, and for the rest of the season, you will.

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