ast season it was "hunt for strikes." This season it's QuesTec strikes.

Once again, major league umpires are engaged in a dispute with Major League Baseball, and yesterday their union filed a second grievance arising from a new computerized system, the QuesTec Umpire Information System, that monitors umpires' ball-and-strike calls.

A year ago the umpires became angered when Sandy Alderson, executive vice president for baseball operations, told an umpire in an e-mail message to "hunt for strikes" to meet baseball's desire for a larger strike zone.

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Because umpiring supervisors have used the QuesTec system to tell umpires when they think the umpires are missing too many pitches, the World Umpires Association last month requested information about the system. The commissioner's office declined to supply the information or to answer a list of 50 questions the union had posed to Alderson.

As a result, Larry Gibson and Joel Smith, lawyers who are representing the union, sent an eight-page letter yesterday to Rob Manfred, baseball's chief labor executive, saying that the union was entitled to the information, citing the collective bargaining agreement and previous rulings by the National Labor Relations Board.

Manfred based baseball's refusal to provide the requested information on a section of the agreement that calls for a joint committee of supervisors and umpires to meet after the season to analyze the system and determine standards for rating umpires.

"We will re-evaluate QuesTec following the season," Manfred said. "We did that because we didn't want to be messing around with it this year, and we sent it to the joint committee so we wouldn't be lawyered up on this."

But the union indicated in a statement that as long as umpires were being evaluated on their calls based on the system, it did not want to wait until the end of the season to have its questions answered. The union, the statement said, continues to have serious concerns about the system's accuracy.

"The apparatus appears to have difficulty tracking certain types of breaking pitches, and there is unacceptable inconsistency as to where the QuesTec operators draw the top and bottom lines of the strike zone," the union said.

"Like last year's `pitch count' directives, QuesTec interjects an extraneous element into the game and pressures umpires to compete with the machine rather than giving their full attention to calling the game as they see it unfold before them."

The system uses video cameras in four different locations at about six ballparks, including Shea Stadium. Operators set the strike zone on the computer based on each batter's approach to hitting the ball.

The union employed scientists to help it compile the list of 50 questions for Alderson. One example: "Does the extrapolation of the final path of the ball based on the measured positions, velocity and acceleration assume constant accelerations?"