A spokesman for Major League Baseball's umpires union has accused MLB's security investigators of being like "secret police" because of the extensive background checks made on each of the league's umpires, the Associated Press has reported. "Major League Baseball's security staff is essentially defaming umpires in their communities by conducting strange, surreptitious, and poorly-executed investigations resembling that of secret police in some despotic nation," the spokesman Lamell McMorris told the AP.