Umpires Threaten to Resign

Major league umpires, at odds with owners since Roberto Alomar spat at an umpire three years ago, voted Wednesday in Philadelphia to resign Sept. 2 and not work the final month of the season.

The decision, announced after a meeting of the Major League Umpires Assn., amounted to the first blow in their latest dispute with baseball.

Owners, meanwhile, seemed almost pleased.

“This is either a threat to be ignored, or an offer to be accepted,” said Sandy Alderson, executive vice president of baseball operations.

There are 68 major league umpires, and 57 of them attended the meeting and said they wouldn’t work the last 4 1/2 weeks of the season. The other 11 were expected to announce their resignations in the next few days.

What set the umpires off this time was National League president Len Coleman’s three-day suspension of umpire Tom Hallion on July 2 for bumping a player. It was the first such action that baseball officials could remember.

Richie Phillips, the umpires’ union head, said umpires plan to form a new corporation on Sept. 3 and have the AL and NL contract for services. Umpires plan to supervise themselves and make their own schedules, he said.

Owners, however, could hire umpires from minor leagues, high schools and colleges, as they have during previous work stoppages.

*

Fans have been invited to wear brightly colored Hawaiian shirts--Houston Astro Manager Larry Dierker’s favorite--to welcome him back tonight at the Astrodome against the Detroit Tigers.

A month ago, Dierker was carried out of the Astrodome, the victim of a grand mal seizure, and had an emergency operation to repair blood vessels in his brain.

*

The Kansas City Royals, who went into the All-Star break on a five-game losing streak and trail Cleveland by 21 games in the AL Central, gave Manager Tony Muser and his coaching staff contract extensions through 2000.

*

The All-Star game had the second-lowest television rating in 30 years.

Tuesday night’s 4-1 victory by the American League on Fox posted a 12.0 national rating and a 22 share, 9% lower than last season’s NBC telecast, which had a 13.3 and 25.

The lowest rating in the game’s history, a 11.8 and 21, came in 1997, Fox’s first broadcast of the event.

*

Sparky Anderson, the former Detroit and Cincinnati manager who lives in Thousand Oaks, will undergo heart bypass surgery in a Los Angeles-area hospital.

Anderson, 65, became ill before a celebrity golf tournament in Michigan and was hospitalized Tuesday for testing.