Close Call Sports, Lindsay Imber on the new MLB Rules, Pitch Clocks & NHL Ducks

Close Call Sports with Lindsay Imber - 186 BaseballBiz

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: [00:00:00] Welcome to Baseball Biz On Deck. I'm Mark Car host, and today we're gonna look at the close calls that happen in sports and with me today. I have an individual who is. Been tied into baseball in so many ways, whether it be through music, whether it be through analyzing as an umpire, whether it be running through statistics, but most importantly, we're talking with Lindsay Ember today.

And Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Mark. Man, I cannot tell you enough how much I enjoy watching your close call sports on YouTube, the things that you cover there, just one it amazes me because we see. during a game as fans in baseball, all these different activities going on at the plate and we see the umpire make a judgment or somebody's thrown out or they see their ball or a strike and we're scratching our hands and say, what the heck?

[00:01:00] But you give us clarity . So let me say thank you for that because folks, if you haven't a gone and seen Close Call Sports on YouTube, please do, because Lindsay does a great. You gimme an idea of how you got involved with this. I know you grew up in la didn't you? 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah. I grew up in LA and this thing, this whole idea started back in 2006, I believe it was.

And it basically started as just logging, eject, and keeping track of Umpires just as a very informal email chain between a few friends. And even before then, the way that I actually got into officiating to begin with was, . We had one of those student verse faculty. Games, activities at school one day.

And it was, I noticed that there was one referee for it, and it was another staff member. And I thought that doesn't seem too fair considering it. And we go back and if you. If you're listening to this and you remember the old school way when [00:02:00] the AL and NL were separate, fully separate, you'd have split squads, you'd have half the umpires from the al, half, the umpires from the nl whenever you had inter league like World Series or all store game or things like that.

So I thought there should be a student that's. doing this and I guess I volunteered and from there I stuck with it. So anyway, 2006, start this Ejection Fantasy League and it was very simple. We'll keep track of it then it's expanding to, okay, we, let's make it a little bit more spicy by perhaps trying to attribute a quality of correctness.

Try to figure out if the umpire was correct on a call or not, and you'd get positive points if they were right and negative. If they were proven to be incorrect. And so just really developed in from there where we were just finessing it on and on. And at some point I think this was probably, , 2010, 2011, 12, we moved to the new domain and it was, it became more about, okay, we can actually talk about plays that aren't only ejection plays, like [00:03:00] there are big plays that happen in baseball.

So it started with the sort of the marquee plays that everyone's talking about, that there's controversy about, and then it moved to the more minute. and the more esoteric umpiring stuff where it's these quirky rules that are different in college versus the pro versus high school and things like that.

The baseball rules differences for those of you that know that book. And from there it just turned into basically any time that there is anything in the game that needs a rules touch to it. That's. . That's why I do what I do. Basically, I try to educate the fans and try to bridge the gap between fans, coaches, and umpires and such like that.

Just make it so that everyone's on the same page. This is the rule book. These are the motivations that these different people have for doing what they do on the field, and ideally we can work better as. Team, and that means the umpires can work with the teams better without as much animosity at the end of the day.

And it's just a smoother experience for everyone in [00:04:00] sports at the end of the day, even though you have these hundreds of millions and billions of dollars is about having fun. And so maybe if PE more people are educated about the rules and the spirit of the game. There will be less of an emphasis on this argumentative style that we've developed in baseball and more of an emphasis on just playing and having fun.

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I can certainly appreciate that. Mean I almost think of an old Norman Rockwell painting I of a umpire in the face of a manager and a manager in the face of an umpire or a Billy Martines type situation. , but the ideal is of course to be, has some kind of kumba Yeah.

Some kind of understanding of what's going on. And, it's nice when I go out and I see the catcher and. Umpire getting along with one another. Even when the catcher kind of protecting the umpire I see questions being asked by a batter, but sometimes you're thinking, okay, maybe that's a little bit too much.

They're trying to have a rapport. I wanted to get into spring training and what's shake out with it. Before we do though [00:05:00] you recently put up something close called sports about basically the rule acumen of certain players. I think it was an E S P N poll that came out and they asked 10 questions.

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah, it's pretty simple in theory, right? It's just a 10 question quiz. True false. So on average, if you guess true to everything, you'd get a 40%. And if you guess false to everything, you'd get a 60%. There's only two choices per question. Simple concept, but they put it out and the results were on the one hand expected.

But on the other hand, still surprising that people that are making so much money in this game don't not actually know the rules of the game that they're playing. . 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Yeah you had the, was this Aaron Boone stat? 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: That was, yeah, that was bizarre. And, and this was back when Boone had retired and he was bouncing between that coaching and media personality, managing all of the above.

And it was played off as a joke oh yeah, Aaron Boone, that knucklehead got one out of 10, and it was played off that [00:06:00] way, but, , he subsequently got the Yankees gig, and now one out of 10 isn't a laughing matter anymore when the stakes are so high. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: No, and they are, and the understanding of what is around those stakes, I think has become challenging.

And you've really been covering that with the new rules during the spring training because it doesn't seem like everybody's on the same page with. Oh 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: gosh, no . Where 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: did we start with that? Lindsay, what's, what has been some of the biggest head scratching or things that people still need to figure out when it comes to that?

In springing training with the new rules? The three 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: rules that are the fundamental rules changes are going to be your bigger bases, your infield shift ban, and your pitch clock, and no one really pays attention to the bigger bases because that's just a physical thing that's on the field. No one really needs.

To know that, right? It's just there. As far as the infield shift band, that's just an easy way to just pre-pitch positioning for your team what you can and cannot do. [00:07:00] Whe So whether you like the rule or not, that's pretty simple. It's the pitch clock. That's the complicated thing for everyone because.

you're adding a clock into a game that never had a clock before, right? N F L has a play clock. N B A has a shock clock, but it, they've always had game clocks even before they instituted the play clock or the shock clock respectively. So for those sports, it's a little bit different because they're used to the idea of a clock Baseball no, never been done at the major league level.

So now that they're doing it, people are finding out that the nomar Garcia Parra. Pattern, that habitual motion that he would do step out and adjust the various wrist devices that he wore, doesn't fly anymore because he would take longer than say, 20 seconds to do that. And so you're finding that batters are trying to best adapt to get ready by the eight second mark.

And on that first day of spring training, we had Manny Machado who got called for a. Pitch clock [00:08:00] violation in the very first inning for that reason. And spring training is where you wanna iron that out. So that's by design. There was going to be violation enforcement in spring training. That's what the directive has been.

And you're getting pitchers who are getting called at the zero second mark. I haven't really seen catchers getting called for failing to be in the box yet. , there's no reason for them not to be, quite frankly. They don't have to be, they don't have to perform a specific action, like the batter has to be alert to the pitcher.

The pitcher has to start their motion, but the catcher just has to physically exist in a box. That's not hard. So between the batters and the pitchers, there's the. We had the Scher rule that came into play or interpretation. He's trying to best take advantage of the timing that he is given, and he's trying to throw the batters off by coming set before they're ready to go, which was okayed in his game.

But then now it's emphasized that, okay, you're not allowed to do that. So Scher can't do that thing [00:09:00] anymore. And today I've got a video to do. Nestor Cortez got called for a quick pitch in Washington. . And then the next pitch he decided, I'm just going to take an extra long time in my delivery. , oh man.

Broke to the batter. And it gets into the question of what's the penalty for this? There's no runner on base. There isn't. It's, you know as well as anyone that don't do that rule, which has no legal mechanism for enforcement, you just tell them not to do that. And it's funny because the umpire, I think it was Quinn Walcott, just goes out, points at the picture, starts walking out, and does that gesture, two fingers to his eyes like I'm watching you

But you have to get creative. And the point with these rules is anytime you come up with a rule, there's gonna be someone who tries to get around the rule. And it's how legislative does baseball want to be? How annoying do they want to be with what you can and cannot do? It's oh, you move this way and you're supposed to move that way.

So we're gonna call this penalty. know, Thank [00:10:00] you. The thank you tools that are coming out this year in spring. Spring has always been designed as an adjustment period. But I see this carrying into the regular season and once it hits that regular season and there are legitimate consequences like game ending situations that go on the record for the year, things like that.

I don't think it's gonna be funny. No, 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: There what we had a balk offer too. I think last year during the regular season I was watching the game and something, the game is turned over cuz the pitcher supposedly balked him, was really questionable in my mind. Of course, I think it was the Tampa Bay race.

It was my pitcher, . But the thing was that, From that ball know there was the run came across the play cuz the bases were loaded with that. The ma'am took first and there we go. It's done. And there's so much that a umpire has to keep their mind on and their eye on. And to add this on new with the pitch clock and then trying to find people who are trying to work it like Scherzer.

It's gotta be a challenge for these umpires. And I [00:11:00] don't know if spring training is enough time for them to get it all figured. . 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah. My my, my better half in, in the close Call universe TMAC worked the one of those TrackMan games up in the Atlantic, and I remember that, there's. There, there is so much added pressure using that fully automated system, and that's not a pitch clock system.

That's not what they were doing at the time. But anytime you add to the plate umpire's workload, you decrease human performance. This is actually something that I learned from the N T S B because they have human factors, investigators for their various operations. . If you add too much to someone's workload, it creates problems and just complications.

We saw the Randy Rosenberg ejection of JT or El Muto yesterday. Yep. By the time you listened to this show, it could be last week or last month, right? . But we saw that and it looked like a very quick trigger ejection, and you go into it and you saw that the pitch clock issue, a pitch clock violation on the pitcher, Kyrell [00:12:00] led to the whole thing.

It spurred the whole thing. And from there, the way that they want it is they want that clock to reset and start again when the pitcher gets the ball again. And what happens if the pitcher keeps throwing the ball out of play? And what, at what point does that become unsporting? You get into a situation where ordinarily an umpire that tries to put a ball into the catcher's mint, Or throws it into a catcher's medicine do and it falls on the ground.

You could just pick it up. That's it. But if you have a clock running, that's added pressure all of a sudden, in addition to everything else that you have to do. And now you have conflict between the defensive team and the officiating crew because of that violation call. And it's just so much unnecessary drama in the game.

And it leads to stupid things like, Yeah, 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: that retal, I was sitting there looking at the, okay, guess you didn't see the ball coming from the umpire. And it's like you knew that the umpire was myth, the whole, it was no longer an umpire just analyzing things. Personality comes in there and says, okay, [00:13:00] obviously you're disrespecting me as an umpire, which I don't believe he was.

But that had to be the sense of the umpire behind the plate with that particular action and everything. Mention leading up to that moment . It wasn't surprising that, that he threw real Muto out, but it, and then what happened after 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: that? So it throws 'em out and we have a, what, 2, 3, 4, 5 minute delay while a new catcher comes into the game.

So the pace of play initiative, but for the pitch clock is working beautifully . 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Oh gosh, no. I'll tell you, Lindsay I saw that you do a great job. Again, I encourage everybody to go to YouTube to see close call sports and that whole thing with real meto, because it really does accentuate the idea of trying to save time in these games.

Sometimes it just doesn't work. We've seen some reduction in time during spring training, but there's gonna be moments that are just ugly out there too, like that one. Yeah. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: The fact of the matter is that it's an adjustment for everyone, [00:14:00] and people don't realize that, you're adding workload to the plate on Pire, as we've said, but you're also adding restrictions and considerations for the defensive and the offensive teams.

Likewise to. to play to these new rules. And so the pitcher is gonna be closer to, he's more under pressure now, right? And the batter, same story, because they have to, the batter knows I have to go to the eight second mark in the pitcher. Zero is a little bit longer , so it's easier to draw that out.

But you still have restrictions on throwing to bases. For instance, you have the maximum of two free throw overs or disengage. and we saw that there was a pitch clock violation called the other day. Catcher requested time as the clock was running down. Umpire called time, but the catcher didn't move to go out to talk to their pitcher, so the umpire called a pitch clock violation, even though time had been called.

So there's so many intricacies and [00:15:00] wrinkles in these new rules. because I have suspect that they're making some of this up as they go along , because there are eventual, no matter how well you plan for this or anything, there are eventualities that show up that you were not expecting, and you have to suddenly come up with a way to handle them out of nowhere, and you might have spent.

Months and even years developing the overall scheme of a pitch clock. But you sure have to come up with a way to respond to a situation uniformly league-wide in a matter of hours or days compared to the years that have been spent planning the overall pitch clock. So that's where you can start to get inconsistency.

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: The whole idea, like I said, of the extra way to what everything else that the empires have to cover. I hear even they've got a buzzer on their arm forearm now to let 'em know when time runs, but I just don't know how they can continue to, to be as excellent as they've been in the past with that extra way to other things to be paying attention to.

[00:16:00] I don't know. To me it seems like a heck of a challenge. I know recently. You put something up. Maybe it wasn't so recent where you were talking about the crew chiefs that were coming in and how experience and skills come together. But maybe I'll come back to that actually, cuz that's kinda going off further than I want to.

But coming back to the pitch clock, do you think this is gonna settle down? Do you think the rest of season's gonna see more bumps along the. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: There will be bumps here and there. I don't think that it's going to be as concentrated as it has been in spring training because again, spring is meant for this, but I foresee that there will be issues that arise that we can't even predict yet that.

surely baseball didn't even predict that. We'll oh yeah, arise regarding this, and they'll have to figure out how they want it handled at that time. And there will be confusion and there will be a whole bunch of miscommunication and hurt feelings and potential eject or other detrimental effects for teams [00:17:00] as a result of it.

And that's just growing pains regarding this new technology that baseball so desperately seems to have wanted, or at least the decision makers. I 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: am curious to see how we do with staffing for umpires. And the reason I say that is it seems like in the past, I don't have numbers in front of me, but the number of umpires that came up from the minor leagues was rather limited each year.

You know that once you came in and you were an M L B umpire, you weren't gonna be going anywhere any time soon. I Aging and what we see of some of the umpires is there. I'm wondering with all the training of the new umpires, the new school that, that the MLB has put out there, that they're training across that with all these folks who have been watching in pitch clock in the minor leagues, how many of them will we be seeing coming up?

Has there been much change in the umpire staff from 2022 to 2020? 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: I don't have league like organizational wide statistics on this, but [00:18:00] I don't think that it's been that drastic compared to prior years. You have basically, this is a gen, this is around the time of a generational retirement. We go back to the 1999 failed resignation strategy and so many people coming into the league at that time, and they got vested 20 years in, and so this is of this.

We're in that five to maybe seven year window of increased retirement rates, and we saw it with the most retirements at once, since 1999, occurring this past off-season. So you're gonna have new people in the major leagues for that reason alone. And that, of course, cascades and down to the miners.

So you're gonna have people being hired to attrition as it were. , we have to remember that baseball has pushed to actually contract its minor leagues and eliminate markets. Oh yeah. And so that by necessity, eliminates umpire jobs in the [00:19:00] long run. And so that means that whatever gains we think we're getting there are offset by these eliminations that are structural in nature.

you could throw Covid in there. That's another wrench. And at the end of the day, I don't think that the structure in terms of the personnel that is being, that is the influx of personnel versus the outgoing, et cetera. I don't think it's too different from yours past because I think you have offsetting factors involved.

Yeah. That 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: the only reason I was thinking about that is I was wondering as we bring in new umpires from minor leagues, if they will. Oh, I guess I should say more of an being at ease with the pitch clock and some other things that, that have been in the matters for a while. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. There, there's definitely a comfort level. As the statistics bear, the umpires in the minor leagues had been calling to computers for essentially their entire professional career. in some [00:20:00] cases, and you're seeing that those umpires come up and have better numbers, not surprisingly on the computers because they've been trained in calling those things for years compared to the Major League guys who might've come up years ago before even Quest Tech existed.

So they don't have that experience and they're not able to call to the computer and. . So I think that you're absolutely right. It's a salient point that umpires who have developed with a clock their entire professional career would be best equipped to deal with a clock at the major league level because they're used to it versus people coming in who are not used to the clock that now have to adjust to the fact that.

Is a clock the one thing that the clock does that's not talked about as much. And we did talk about the workload of the plate umpire increasing, but a very specific performance factor on that issue is baseball used to always be an eeb flow game. You'd throw a pitch and then you'd throw about.

Umpire would make a call. , it would go [00:21:00] back to the pitcher. And so you would just wait it out until the next pitch needs to be thrown. So there was this wave pattern of high intensity, high involvement in the game. And then once the pitch is done, you can take a breath and it's back to low, and there's that oscillating wave pattern throughout the.

Now with this pitch clock, the umpire has post pitch responsibilities, such as making sure that the clock starts on time making sure that the batter's in the box at eight and the pitcher's ready at, if you have a 15 second clock with no one on base, then that's only effectively a five to seven second break.

Whereas it was a the sort of break arrest period might have been double that in the past. from a human factors perspective, you're in a state of excitement for much longer and for much, for a greater proportion of time than you [00:22:00] had been in the past, and that is proven to have negative effects on human performance.

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Have there been any concerns? I guess wanna say the physical impact on a pitcher, on their ability to take time to, I don't know, relax the arm or if they're being forced to move so quickly that the potential for injury has increased. Is that possible or is that anything that's being discussed?

I guess I should really say. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: We know one thing that can increase pitcher potential for injury, which is the pitch clock violation at zero and they're trying to beat it and they get called time in the middle of their delivery and they. That, that, that's one of those consequences. But we've seen pitchers who can adapt to the groove of a faster pace, and if they incorporate it into their overall game, they just take their cadence and compress it by a factor of however much it needs to be to fit within the confines of the clock [00:23:00] configuration.

They can do that and be unaffected and have a fine game because they're used to working at a faster pace. But for pitchers at a slower pace, that's obviously a bigger adjustment. They might struggle a bit. And for people like Max Jersey, you saw in that. In that Max Scher game that we had where he got called for that pitch clock violation where he came set before the batters got into the box and were ready and alert to the pitcher to try to throw them off, he really threw himself off because suddenly his cadence is disruptive by the very virtue of him voluntarily disrupting it to fool others, except he ends up fooling himself.

So if the pitchers stay in their own game, perhaps they do just as if. just as well, if not better. But if they're going to, just as the umpires do have to play to a clock and that becomes their primary concern or distraction that could have a negative impact on the rest of their performance. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I'm really going to [00:24:00] be watching this year.

How many bases are stolen? 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Pardon me, begin. It should go up. The, the bases are bigger. We don't think about it too often, but I just, I'm putting together a video of unintentional interference and I'm looking at a play at second base, and it was a bad throw. And I realize, oh, the fielder doesn't even have to g go back and lunge because the base is bigger.

So their foot's already there. , . 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: The frequency that a pitcher can throw over is, they can't throw over seven times. They got two shots at it. Two shots of actually stepping off the rubber. Because if they step off for one reason, it doesn't have to be throwing over.

Cuz if they've already stepped off for another reason, then they only have one at that at bat. To go 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: over first. This is one of those rules differences with college, right? In college you are allowed one, as they call it, one free disengagement before you get called for a b on the next one. That is an unsu sec.

That does not result in a a runner being retired or anything like that. However, College treats disengagement [00:25:00] differently than pickoff throws. If you throw the ball to the base, it doesn't count against your limit. So you you still in college have unlimited pickoff throw opportunities in major league baseball.

That's not the case. , you are allowed two disengagement instead of the one in college. But pickoffs count as disengagement. Whether you technically throw to the base from a disengaged position or not, it still counts as a disengagement in Major League baseball for the purposes specifically of this limitation rule.

So in M L. , if you step off for any reason, it counts as a disengagement. Yeah. If you throw over, it also counts as that for the purposes of determining the two limit, the limit of two, and then of course you have to retire the runner on the third time you do it or it's a violation. Yeah, there, there are rules differences that are so perplexing sometimes because you have two different governing bodies doing two different things because they have two different goals.

and in [00:26:00] baseball at the major league level, and even at the minors, the goal is to manufacture offense. The N H L did a whole bunch of rules changes designed to try to manufacture offense during the dead puck era, as it was called, and this was like, 10, 20 years ago, and they ended up succeeding in allowing more goals to be scored.

For instance, instituting the trapezoid that the goalie can't play the puck in certain, in the, in what they call the pie slices in the corners behind the goal line, it led to more offense. And that's appears to be what baseball's trying to do with some of these rules as well. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I'm really curious to see how that'll play out.

And I gotta tell you, I. I disliked that whole thing as far as the disengagement, and I thought, come on, really give a picture a chance. I'm not saying he should be able to throw over there seven times in a row, but something more than two disengagement, especially if you count him just stepping off of, off the rubber as a disengagement and as opposed to [00:27:00] having it measured separately as a throw over.

I don't know. That's a hard point for me. But uh, we'll see how it plays out. My biggest concern always is the players is, hoping that there'll be less injuries. So I'm hoping that larger base actually does some of that. The pitch clock, it's gonna be an interesting watch.

Me, I've never been a person who has a problem with the shift, but a lot of people do, and I get that. I hate it when you see five guys lined up between second and first. But outside of that, I, I like the idea that banners had to be a little bit more creative. They had. Hit oppo, you'd see Bob Chet.

He would, he adjusted to that. But it's the nature of things. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah. The main difference in the sports, speaking of a sport where you're seemingly always either always on or always trying to catch your breath, like basketball or hockey or something, or even, or soccer for that matter.

The difference is, from those to baseball is those sports are all about this, if you think of just a simple [00:28:00] curve that like, like a bell curve that goes up, it hits its apex and it comes back down. And. , it's more compressed in those sports. Whereas in baseball it's not as much of that. It doesn't reach the same peak, but it is a longer duration of intensity, but it's not as intense, if that makes sense.

So effectively you have a higher but narrower peak in some of these other sports baseball. Your mountain curve as it were, is much flatter, but it goes on for longer. Which is a concept that I've become very familiar with lately. and what baseball is effectively doing with this pitch clock.

Shortening games is trying to compress baseball's curve to make it match better with one of those other higher intensity contact sports. And one of the things that I'm of concerned with, as you stated regarding injury, is the durability of baseball players. You play 162 games, right? Plus [00:29:00] spring plus post.

and of those games, that's double what basketball and hockey play and that's, I can't do math in my head times more than football players play. And my concern regarding that durability aspect is if you're compressing that curve, that curves the way that it's set up in baseball, the longer flatter curve lends itself.

A marathon season, but if you start compressing that, is that going to cause problems? If you draw out the games too much and you put people under too much stress and strain in a shorter amount of time throughout the year, that is to be seen. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I know you worked with hockey and in being an org as well and have an interest in the game, but now N H L.

they put a break in the middle of their season. Did they? More so than what we have in baseball with an all-star break. They take a little more time than that, don't they? 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: The N H L instituted because of this and in consultation, I believe it was a c b A [00:30:00] agreement that came through a negotiation that each team has a bi-week.

and you're effectively, you have a break for a week during the season, and that is in addition to the All-Star break that is in addition to the Thanksgiving break. And that is in addition to the Christmas break. NHL takes its time. because it knows what sport it is and it seems to work out well. And of course you have the Olympic break during Olympic years as well, which gives you an extra two weeks off and it draws your season out a little bit longer.

Yes. But it, it allows for different breaks in recovery periods. And I feel for the Olympic athletes who have to go give it their all at the Olympics during the break because they don't get much time off. But baseball doesn't have that as we know, each team plays. Pretty much not for the most part.

It, you can say it's every day with a day off here and a day off there, and it's inconsistent on the days off. We know that baseball has consistent days [00:31:00] off assigned to Monday and Thursday on the calendar. Everyone plays Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday, Wednesday. But what I've noticed is that's the way it used to work.

That's how series were always set up. Three game series four game series. , they were always set up so that the two off days that a team could have were Monday and Thursday. But MLB has tried doing. , and this was an inner league push a few years ago, and by a few years ago, it's probably more than a decade at this point, they had what they would call squeeze weeks, which would be two game series instead of three game series.

And usually the way that it got set up for, especially for inner league teams in the same market, so the stadiums are fairly close together, is that you would get a team playing two games at. At one venue and then they would go and play two games at the other venue. And so it's a four game series, but it's split up into two and two, and within the squeeze week, eventually [00:32:00] they decided, why don't we just take away the second set of two and it's just two games, and then a team can be off on a random Wednesday, so you get more days off that white, but it's still 162 games.

the timeline is still fairly consistent, as in. , you pretty much can say beginning of April to the end of September, but it started creeping because of the extra days off into late March and early October. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Yeah, and I know there's a lot of concern with some folks with the World Baseball Classic about some of these pitchers being over extended, but I know also the pitchers you say they should probably have some time off because even if they're in the winter, There is a break between that time and spring training, but World Baseball Classic.

Oh gosh. There's gotta be a way to place that maybe, I don't know, in the middle of the year, cuz I'm thinking about what hockey has done and putting a space of a couple [00:33:00] of weeks in there. I would just absolutely love to see this. What will we do with the All-Star game though? I don't know.

I'm, I have enjoyed that World Baseball Classic so much and watching so much great talent out there. , 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: you're right, because I remember when M L B said, not regarding the W bbc, but the Olympic games themselves, Hey, we're not gonna be sending major leaguers to the Olympics. And that was how hockey had that stance at one point too.

And so hockey had experimented around with, okay, let's do an Olympic break. Do we take games out of the season? So they shortened the season to accommodate it. Then it became no, we can just push every game. Our 82 game schedule, we would just push all the games back by two weeks to accommodate the break.

Baseball ha has been very, has a very different attitude in this because baseball from the very beginning was whatever the tournament we are going to be playing major league games. basically concurrently with those games at the same time, simultaneous. So right. Major leaguers are obligated to stay in the majors if it's regular [00:34:00] season action.

And so it's just a different approach that they have taken, which as you say deprives us potentially of the opportunity to see something really special in the summer as a showcase. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: indeed. We've been talking a lot about the pitch clock and the new rules that come out, but I have to tell you one of the first things that attracted me to close call sports on YouTube.

were some of the things that you were doing with looking at Joe West and Angel Hernandez early on because gosh dang, those folks would be so entertaining. Not necessarily some teams appreciate that as much as a detached fan, but my gosh, you've always got some great material to work with.

Lindsay. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Thank you. Yeah, I Anytime. , I always say that anytime Joe West was in a title or Angel Hernandez is currently in a title that generally corresponds to an increase in engagement because people just love to a lot of people like to pile on without even knowing what happened. And it's become fun to try to figure out, okay, is this a [00:35:00] situation where we can explain what they're doing?

Or is this a situation where we have to say I have no idea what's going on because this call doesn't make sense to me. And with. with Joe. There was that. There was that, oh, there was a play where, and he has admitted doing to doing this early in the career, which is he'll call it incorrectly.

To test someone. And if I, and it's that's the old school umpire mentality. Oh yeah. You don't do that in the World Series, but you can do it in spring training, for instance. Or that's the way it used to be. And Joe was a very good manager about picking his spots for things like that.

He would know, he knows full well that when time comes down and the numbers do reflect this for Joe, , he steps up and he knows that, okay, my game management ability to give the pitcher the extra edge of the plate or the batter, this, or whatever it is, he knows where he can pick his spots and where he cannot, and he has to call to the computer.

and that's why his post-season numbers, there was [00:36:00] an a L C S game a few years, Houston I think, where he was like one pitch away from a perfect game because he knows when it's crunch time I have to step up and call it this way as opposed to that way. So that was Joe. And I don't want get into a situation where, I don't want to get LeDuc here.

So I'm not gonna, I don't wanna say anything that can get me soup. No. But 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: But that's an interesting point you. about, when he came down the crunch that, he, there was a certain flexibility in spring training at other moments that there wouldn't be in other times.

And that goes to a point that I, again, a little concerned about with all the new rules is you say game management. And I'm thinking flexibility of an umpire in a situation to make a decision as a be hard and fast to a very unique rule that has that flexibility been, diminish. because some of the new rules 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah, I the flexibility and the discretion.

The discretion is the. friend and foe of [00:37:00] umpiring at the same time. So if you're your discretion is what they're trying to eliminate from the game to try to say, Hey, we want you to be uniform. This is really a movement that's been going on ever since they consolidated the leagues like 23 years ago.

So they have really been going on this idea of uniformity and things like that.

yeah, that does eliminate some gay management opportunities and it does eliminate some umpiring abilities to do this, that, or the other, to try to control things. But the idea is that everyone will eventually adjust to what's going on and they will be able to comply with whatever the new terms are whether they like them or they will follow them, and, the, it's to be seen which ones are gonna stick and work and which ones aren't.

We know that the executives like to push things through, or at least it would appear that they do like to push things [00:38:00] through sometimes. And generally speaking, some the players, there used to be an NC two a saying call the foul, the player will adjust. And that's basically it's like institute a new rule.

The players will. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I thank you're on the money with it. I want to thank you again for everything that you do with Close Call Sports. Now, I'll encourage everybody again to watch that, to go to YouTube and because, you give great examples. You give, you break down the rule book on what's being seen and.

Put that video right there and walk us through it, moment by moment, action by action, and then able to point to the rule book saying this is what's being done here. And oh they may have had some confusion or maybe they thought they needed a warning, but it didn't really call for it . So you do a great job of that.

But I wanna also give you kudos because you're very diverse. You're a musician as well. You're an organist for the Anaheim Ducks Aren. I am. That 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: is a job that when I joined the Dodgers in their in security [00:39:00] management back in 2000. Gosh, 11, I don't know what year it is, , but I joined the Dodgers and this, for those of you local to California, you'll remember that 2011 opening day was Brian St.

Violently attacked in the parking lot. And that was my first day when I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't hands-on. I was just sitting back and observing what was going on. And I hear this call about this atrocity, and I'm like, . Is this how it is here every day? Oh God. And you realize that it's not every day that bad, but there is there.

So anyway I started at Dodgers. I very quickly said, I'm not going home at five o'clock. because of traffic. Traffic's too bad and I get too frustrated. And when your brain tells you that you need more things to do, sitting in traffic is not hel a helpful coping mechanism, . So instead I would stay at the stadium and it's oh, press box.

That's where we, that's where we would as staff, that's where we would on, during the off season eat lunch [00:40:00] anyway. , that's where they serve the food. That's where we'd eat the lunch. So we would basically sit in the press reporter seats and that's where we would eat and press box had the organ there.

And so eventually I was like, Hey, I can play piano, so I'm I should play this too. I've long very, I had a very long. Idolization of the organist position and for the Dodgers at the time it was Nancy B and I followed her a lot in terms of what her career was up to. And I thought, wouldn't this be a treat to play on this on this instrument of hers?

It's not hers technically, or it's the stadiums right, but it's the teams. But I thought I'm not doing anything. There's no one. and I need to do something for an hour or two until it's time to go home. Traffic cleared up enough and so I would just play organ. In the press box. There was a role in Detelier, a d s, and eventually I was playing and the one of the sound guys like in maintenance people and [00:41:00] operations that hooked me up with how to do this and how to do that, and eventually our sandage near there was like, Hey, this is good.

there was a corporate batting practice going on. He, and they use a DJ playlist for those corporate bang practices. He's Hey, you want us play live in the bowl for this thing? And I did. And I became the I became the sort of corporate event organist, if that makes any sense. So I did that for a little while and eventually I left the security position there and,

It was funny because I left, I thought I had left the doctors in 2014, only for them to talk to me in 2015 and say Nancy's going on vacation for an entire home stand. Would you like to be substituting in for, a six day residency or whatever? And of course I jumped at that. And so it's like I left the team in 2014, but I got hired in a different department on the team in 20 20 15.

 And that was around the time I had just done the Ducks Stanley Cup run in, [00:42:00] in 2015. That was my first time in Anaheim as well. And the Ducks knew me from the Dodgers, oddly enough, and they knew that I had been playing organ for corporate bps and things like that. And I had a YouTube channel with, and I still do with a whole bunch of musical performances and things like.

especially with the focus on ballpark organ and they liked what they heard and brought me into audition and I went down and started playing and if they very quickly offered me the job there, they basically goes downstairs, we wanna hear what it sounds like in the bowl. They go down, they come up like a minute later.

Okay. You got the job, . And so I was on summer break from the ducks when the Dodgers called and the only reason the Dodgers ended up calling is not cuz they knew me from Dodgers. it was because they they called the ducks to ask them who their organist was. . Wow. So that's a very backwards way of getting back into the Dodgers organization, but whatever.

And I've been in Anaheim ever since playing these hockey games and it's been a great [00:43:00] time and. , especially early on, I think I know it's not what kept me on the team, but I know that a valuable contribution I've made is I know the rules of the game. And when a referee calls something, I, number one, obviously I'm gonna tailor my song selection to what's going down on the ice.

So hooking, I do like that. Never smile at a crocodile. The Captain Hook stuff from Peter Pan , things like that. Delay of game is clocks. There's some go-tos that I have. I just came up with. One yesterday actually, that I could have come up with a long time ago, but it just occurred to me yesterday, which was on a power play.

Talk on a power play. It was Britney Spears stronger, it's the, it's, anyway it's fun to come up with things that fit the situation. And so knowing the rules, I would be able to call out penalties. I'd see the referee. So I'm like, okay, we have a delayed penalty here and ev and then the call gets made and I can tell it's oh, it's a trip, it's a hook, it's a whatever it is.

So we have everything ready to go, graphics and all of the other stuff ahead of [00:44:00] time. And so I would be calling games when people don't know whether we're going on timeout or not, because icing, you don't go to a tv timeout, things like that. I would be able to call those things ahead of time, which was like, okay, I have a valuable perspective for our little team.

just throughout the, I started that in 2015. It's 2023 now. So this is like year number eight. And it really feels the time has flying flown, fly, flu, fly . I should consult my gramer, but I am, I'm also not that dedicated to. the language . 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: You are dedicated to your music and you're dedicated to the game, and we can't thank you enough, Lindsay, for that because you make it very enjoyable.

I, I gotta tell you, I've been in some. Some games where the only thing that's played are sound effects. . I figured there's somebody with just a few keys to do that with. But from what I've seen of yours with the Anaheim Ducks, I love it the way you're incorporating different tunes that match up to the action out there in the calls.

So I, I want to congratulate you. [00:45:00] Is there anything else that you want to share with our audience here today about the, what they should be thinking as opening days coming here in a moment, or, . 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Yeah. I, we, I still have to put the crew list out, don't I? At least things sneak up on me because there was a time with baseball it was like, okay, when can I put this stuff out?

It's not public, so when can I put, it, MLB at one point got mad at me for putting out quote unquote private information uh, ahead of time. So I have to walk a fine line with that. Just a quickie on this one. This was when Bob Davidson. And his last game was with the Angels. And so this is in Anaheim, it's 2000, whatever it is.

And this was one of those years where you know how MLB on the last day of the season, they like to synchronize all the games to start at the same time? Oh yeah. So East Coast was 3 0 5 in the West coast. It was. It was basically noon which is around the time that I'm pulling into Angel Stadium parking lot.

We used to park at Angels for Ducks games cuz the buildings are across the street from each other [00:46:00] and I'm pulling in there as their game's getting going and I hear over the pa that it's Bob Davison's last game. And so I post the retirement story on the site. I get a call from Major League Baseball being super mad about like, how, why, how did you know?

How could you post this proprietary information, whatever. And I'm like, okay, before I respond to this we got the stadium public address announcement. I looked at the Angels game notes. It was also in there that it's Bob's last game after 30 whatever years. And then, , it was tweeted by an Angel's Beat reporter, , and this is like an hour before I said anything, and two hours before I put it on the site.

So I'm like, I know what you guys are thinking, but I really don't break news. I just fix it.

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Oh gosh, Lindsay. Oh love the organism. That's mlb, I'll tell you that. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: A lot of people do. But yeah, as opening day gets going, I would just say that it [00:47:00] baseball season, it's basically you. What I always found interesting working at Dodgers and I guess ducks too, is opening day is this mammoth event, right?

With sellouts everywhere and all this stuff. So you go from zero to 100 basically in baseball. Oh yeah. And it's the same thing on the last day of the season. You go from 100 back to zero when you're done, when your team is done. As the season starts up, we have growing pains with the new rules, mainly the pitch clock.

I think that eventually it will not be as big of a story. It is now, but while it is still a big story, as long as that is still something that people are interested in talking about, I'm very happy to be doing videos on it because I also like to make fun of rules that I don't like. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: Thank you for sharing that enjoyment with us cuz we love it and I'll encourage everyone again talking with Lindsay Ember and that's Lindsay is the host and organizer and I guess boss of it all when it comes to close cost sports, so the close [00:48:00] cost sports channel on YouTube.

Great stuff to see and entertaining as well. So Lindsay, thank you very much for joining us here today on Baseball Biz, and I hope you have a wonderful. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: Thanks so much for having me. Everyone please subscribe to Close Call Sports on YouTube. 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: There you go. Where else can he find. 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: close call sports.com or so original twitter.com/close.

Call sports facebook.com/close Call Sports. I tried Instagram, but I got super frustrated with it and I just don't trust TikTok enough to use it. , okay. No, it actually, I don't know. Will it get banned? What? What's gonna happen with that? I've been following it very loosely, but I'm like I've never was on it in the first place, so why should I even care?

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: I think that's a good strategy. Oh wow. Again, thank you Lindsay. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you. Thanks again to Lindsay Eber from Close Call Sports, one of the most interesting YouTube channels I ever found. And I gotta tell you, Lindsay, like I said, does a fantastic job of [00:49:00] bringing up what's happening across the plate and giving some great details on umpire's decisions.

So I strongly suggest checking her out. Also wanna remind you that I'll be down at the Tampa Baseball Museum. That'll be, actually, I'll be there on opening day, so March 30th. Hope to see you there. Plus, Matt, Jermaine and I are gonna be taking a look at opening day, what it's gonna be looking like across all 30 teams in the MLB universe.

So we look forward to talking to you about that as well in an upcoming episode. And thank you again for joining us today here on Baseball Biz On Deck. And remember, you can find us across pretty much any of the podcast directories as well as finding us on the website of baseball biz ondeck.com. So thank you again for joining us today, and we look forward to talking you again real 

Lindsay Imber - Close Call Sports: soon.

Special thanks 

Mark Corbett - BaseballBiz On Deck: to X take R U X for the music rocking forward.[00:50:00]