Baseball to Sit Down With Umps

Major league officials said Monday that they expected to meet soon with representatives of the umpires’ union in hopes of resolving a suddenly smoldering dispute arising from baseball’s strike zone.

Sandy Alderson, baseball’s executive vice president of operations, has recently notified some umpires that they need to call more strikes, thus reducing the number of pitches and game times.

The umpires union filed a grievance Saturday, claiming the pressure to lower pitch counts threatens the integrity of the game. Baseball lawyers responded to the grievance by letter Monday, and industry officials attempted to allay concerns in phone calls to several crew chiefs.

“Any concern they had should have led to a meeting before this,” Alderson said. “This would have been much better handled in a less public forum. I can’t believe that it’s received as much attention as it has.”

Alderson, as part of the attempt to standardize the strike zone, has notified about a dozen of the 80-plus umpires that their high pitch counts over a large sampling of games suggests that their strike zone is too small and they need to call more strikes on the low, inside and high margins of the defined zone.

“We didn’t set any quotas,” he reiterated by phone from New York. “All we said was that there was a fairly strong correlation between the misapplication of the strike zone and a high pitch count. I’m not saying that a high pitch count is determinative, but it’s one of several factors we’re using in trying to establish an appropriate and consistent application of the strike zone.”

Another high-ranking baseball official said it all comes down to accountability on the part of the umpires.

“If they were sincere about the integrity of the game, they would have come to us before going to the media,” he said. “We’ve certainly had our differences with the players’ union over the years, but any time there’s a problem, [union director] Don Fehr or [associate] Gene Orza calls [someone on our side] and we give them the same courtesy.”