NEW YORK – Richie Garcia was among baseball’s best-rated and most popular umpires, and like many umps was known for the ones he missed: the Jeffrey Maier call in the playoffs, the pitch to Tino Martinez in the World Series.
He lost his job in the failed labor strategy of mass resignations in 1999 and was welcomed back to Major League Baseball two years later as a supervisor.
Then, out of nowhere it seemed, he was fired on the eve of the 2010 season. Garcia stayed quiet for a decade, not wanting to cause any problems for son-in-law Vic Carapazza, among the top umps of the current group.
Now, at 77, Garcia is fed up. He’s feeling impugned by a former colleague in a lawsuit Garcia has nothing to do with. “I worked too hard to keep a good