If the concept for the Umpire Ejection Fantasy League seems out of left field, then it’s fitting that it first started at a site Imber began called The Left Field Corner. In 2007, Imber created one of the oddest fantasy leagues out there. His foray into the baseball internet began even before that gig. After he clocked out, desperate to avoid driving home from downtown Los Angeles during rush hour, he’d fiddle around on the Dodger Stadium organ. A classically trained pianist, he taught himself to play the organ during a previous job with the Dodgers. Even that gig links back to America’s Pastime. He has multiple day jobs, but the most notable is that he is the game day organist for the Anaheim Ducks. With him, it always comes back to baseball and umpiring. “That was my first assignment, I suppose.”ĬloseCallSports’ is Imber’s brainchild and side project, one into which he pours hours and hours of his time purely out of passion. “I noticed that they had appointed a staff member to officiate that contest with no student representative, and I felt that quite unfair,” says Imber, now 32. But it was destined to be an ultimate sham unless there was a key change made to the officiating. The scene was a middle school game of ultimate frisbee between students and faculty. That kind of attention from the powers that be is quite the stamp of legitimacy for a small site that was started a decade ago by a hockey organist whose officiating role model is Winnie the Pooh. Often, the site finds, it was.ĬloseCallSports has so ingrained itself into the world of umpiring that it often publishes crew assignments before they are officially released, a practice so concerning to MLB that, according to former umpire Dale Scott, the league once warned its umpires they would be “severely fined” if caught passing information to the site. When an ejection is made and fans cry “Ump Show!” CloseCallSports digs into the rulebook to determine whether the precipitating call was, in fact, correct. Rather than preach the gospel of the K-zone, seen on every broadcast and featured in MLB’s AtBat App, CloseCallSports instead points out its many flaws. Here, umpires are not easy scapegoats used to explain a favorite team’s misfortunes but are instead professionals whose performance is worthy of deep, detailed study. They are inured to having any mistake, no matter how small and how infrequent, trumpeted as proof of their bias and ineptitude.īut CloseCallSports offers a refreshing change of perspective, despite Davidson’s first encounter with the comment section. They are accustomed to opening Twitter to seeing screenshots of the K-zone proliferate like they are handed down from on high. Umps, both amateur and professional, are used to turning on a game and hearing broadcasters groan over a borderline call. They come because CloseCallSports is something of an oasis in an online desert that is either hostile or simply indifferent to the art of officiating baseball games. “Most of the guys who are working read the website every day,” Davidson says. (If Davidson’s name is familiar, it might be because he famously ejected Expos mascot Youppi! from a 1989 game in Montreal for the offense of banging on the top of the visiting dugout.) And a small, silent cohort is made up of just about every working ump in the major leagues. Some are former MLB umps like Davidson, who began commenting regularly on the site after retiring in 2016. Many are amateur umps who, contrary to the common refrain, do watch Major League Baseball games for the umpires. In the grand scheme of things, CloseCallSports’ readership is tiny, its 10,000 daily pageviews a mere drop in the vast ocean of the baseball internet. It was funny then - criticism rolls off an umpire’s back like water off a duck’s - but what Davidson couldn’t have known at the time was how essential a destination that small website would become to him.
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