Roberto Alomar

Alomar was traded to the Baltimore Orioles after the 1995 season. He remained an excellent player and continued to rack up Golden Glove awards and annual All-Star designations, but his career was marred by an unfortunate incident late in 1996. In one of the final games of the regular season, umpire John Hirschbeck mistakenly called a far outside pitch that should have been a ball a third strike. Alomar and Hirschbeck exchanged words at the plate. Alomar returned to the dugout peaceably, but once there he continued to complain about the unfairness of the call. Hirschbeck then threw Alomar out of the game, at which point Alomar and Orioles' manager Davey Johnson ran out onto the field to contest the call. The exchange that followed was very heated. Hirschbeck allegedly insulted Alomar in profane terms, but the cameras that were filming the game could not capture those words. What the cameras did capture, the image that was broadcast across the country in the days that followed, was Alomar spitting at Hirshbeck.

Alomar immediately regretted his behavior, but it was too late. The incident, and the league's handling of it, provoked a storm of controversy. Many people, including the umpires' union, said that Alomar's fivegame suspension, which he would not have to serve until the beginning of the next season, was too light. The umpires threatened to go to strike over their perception that the league was not taking an assault on one of their own seriously, and it took a court order to get them to keep officiating. In the meantime, the day after Alomar spat at Hirschbeck he hit a home run in the tenth inning to win a spot in the playoffs for Baltimore.