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| Thursday, July 26 Report: E-mails illustrate pressure to umpires ESPN.com news services |
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Sandy Alderson, the executive vice president of baseball operations, last week characterized a grievance brought by major-league umpires over pitch counts as "a misinterpretation." But copies of e-mails sent by Alderson to three major-league umpires were obtained and published by The New York Times. The e-mails show how umpires could have inferred a different message from Major League Baseball. The Times reported that the copies were provided to the newspaper by a baseball official.
"The MLB average per 9-inning game is 283 and our average should be around 270- 275. In order to bring your pitch count down you must call more strikes HIGH, LOW and IN. Be aggressive, particularly, in your case, down. You'll be happy with the results!"
Noting that Culbreth had more than 300 pitches in that day's Kansas City-Detroit game, Alderson wrote: "You simply are not calling enough strikes from game to game. There must be more pitches up, down and in that can be called strikes. Look for them and call them! Your plate job on Sunday will be televised by ESPN using their new `Kzone' tracking system. If you continue to call balls and strikes as you have, ESPN will be very critical of your performance and it will reflect poorly on the entire staff." Alderson referred to the interleague game between the Mets and the Yankees, the last one before the All-Star break. Each team used four pitchers in a 4-1 game that lasted 2 hours and 58 minutes, but they threw a relatively low total of 265 pitches. Alderson, one of several officials who communicated with umpires on the subject of calling strikes, sent e-mail to Joyce and others from his home in San Francisco on July 4. Ten days later. the umpires union filed a grievance against Major League Baseball, saying it was violating the labor contract by evaluating umpires on the number of pitches thrown in games. The umpires dropped their grievance last week when the commissioner's office said it wouldn't use pitch counts to evaluate an umpire's performance. Joyce told The Times in reference to the e-mails: "Originally I was surprised. I really didn't know what to think at that time. "I was a little bit upset at the time, but part of me said I know what's going on," Joyce said. "Maybe they're just trying to light a fire, give us a heads up. They want us to call more high strikes, low strikes and inside strikes. "My second thought was I thought I did that anyway. After that I thought, I'm not really responsible for pitch counts. It's the pitcher's count, not my count. They call it a pitch count for a reason. They don't call it an ump's count." "I would characterize this as a misinterpretation on their part, which led to the filing of the grievance in absence of private dialogue," Alderson said last week after the grievance was dropped. "I think it is important that it is behind us and we go forward," he said. Since spring training, Alderson and commissioner Bud Selig have pushed for umpires to enforce the strike zone as the rule book defines it, which results in more high strikes. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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