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Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners are poised to embellish the All-Star Game by linking it to home-field advantage for the World Series, but the Players' Association isn't ready to endorse the idea.

Baseball officials are concerned that the sport's midseason event has lost fan interest in recent years. They felt it was especially harmed last July when the game ended in a tie after 11 innings because both teams ran out of pitchers.

Selig hasn't decided if he'll bring up the issue at an owners meeting in Arizona next week, a baseball official said, but he favors awarding home-field advantage in the World Series to the team from the league that wins the All-Star Game.

Because the game involves players' job assignments, any changes require union approval. That approval is apparently not coming quickly. People familiar with union officials said Friday that they questioned whether the change would achieve the desired result.

Donald Fehr, the union's executive director, didn't express opposition to the plan, but he didn't give it a ringing endorsement, either.

"It's an issue we are looking at," Fehr said. "We're considering it. We're not prepared to say anything more about it at this stage.

"We probably will have something to say next week."

Rob Manfred, the clubs' chief labor executive, has discussed the matter with Gene Orza, the union's associate general counsel, so, unlike the contraction issue of a year ago, the union is aware of what the clubs would like to do.

Officials have discussed a series of changes that they say would make the game more attractive to fans, taking it back to the years when it had a larger audience. Officials believe the added significance of World Series home-field advantage would have an effect on fan interest.

Also under consideration is the idea of having the starting players, those selected by the fans, remain in the game longer than they have in recent years. Of the 16 starting position players in last year's game, three-fourths left the game before five innings had been played.

Ever since fans at Camden Yards in Baltimore reacted angrily in 1993 when Mike Mussina of the Orioles did not get into the game, managers have tried to use all 60 all-stars on the two rosters. It was that endeavor that prompted Joe Torre of the New York Yankees and Bob Brenly of the Arizona Diamondbacks to run out of pitchers last year.

After the 11th inning, they went to Selig and told him they had no more pitchers, and the commissioner was left with no reasonable choice but to end the game.

The rules stipulate that a pitcher cannot pitch for more than three innings, but in recent years few pitchers have pitched even that many. Of the 19 pitchers who appeared in last year's game, five pitched two innings each, 10 worked one inning each and four got one or two outs each.