Owners ratify umps contract

PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) — Baseball owners unanimously ratified a five-year contract with umpires on Thursday, wrapping up a decade of labor peace in a sport once plagued by work stoppages.

The deal, expected to be ratified by umpires on Monday, would remove a ban on umpires appearing in consecutive World Series, according to a person with knowledge of the agreement.

The agreement also would allow management to use video to evaluate umpires and establish new programs for early retirement, a person at the meeting said.

Ending the World Series restriction would allow the best umpires to work those games in repeated seasons. Removal of that provision would come after several blown calls during the 2009 postseason.

Baseball has not had a serious labor problem since 1999, when a dispute led to mass resignation by umpires, with 22 of them losing their jobs. There has been no work stoppage in the sport since 1994.

“Having lived through the work stoppages of ’72, ’76, ’80, ’81, ’85, ’90, ’94, that you’d have 16 years of labor peace, peace with the umpires, it’s one of the things I’m very proud of,” commissioner Bud Selig said.

Later Thursday, Selig’s new committee for on-field matters held its first meeting. The 14-member committee, formed a month ago, is considering a wide range of issues, including whether to expand the use of instant replay and possibly extending the first-round playoff series to a best-of-seven format. It will make recommendations to the commissioner and the owners.

“We talked about everything,” Selig said. “I said there would be no sacred cows, there were no sacred cows. The only subject that we didn’t talk about is they didn’t evaluate the commissioner. Other than that we really discussed everything from A to Z.”