The curious case of the GLSCL extra-inning rule

FINDLAY -- The Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League, home of Findlay's own Flag City Sluggers, has been running since 1987. In 2021, however, the game changed. Following a decision made in Major League Baseball that same year, the GLSCL adopted its own "extra-inning rule", but the route the league took to get there was certainly an eventful one.GLSCL media relations director Brady Laber knows first-hand why the league's adoption of an extra-innings rule was not only wanted, but needed. A longtime staff member of the GLSCL, Laber has worked both sides of the coin, working as a team general manager before transitioning into an office role for the league. That experience as a member of a team's staff shaped Laber's view that an extra-innings rule was necessary."So, before I took this job in the league office, I worked for a team within the league called the Cincinnati Steam," Laber said. "I was there 11 years, the last five as the GM. We had an infamous game with the Michigan Monarchs, who were then known as the Lake Erie Monarchs, back in 2013. It was the second game of a doubleheader, so we're scheduled to play two (seven-inning games). We play the first one, get the seven-inning game in, no big deal. The second game proceeds to last 23 innings. So, if you're doing the math at home, that's 30 innings of baseball in one day. That's a lot. We had position players pitching, we had pitchers in the field.""Many years later, fast forward to the 2020 COVID season in the big leagues," Laber continued. "They went to the ghost runner to start the 10th inning. That's when we as a league said, 'Okay, we finally fixed this.' Now we can actually do a similar, extra-inning kind of thing where we don't have to worry about a 23-inning game. Because, it turns into a lot of things. You're trying to save pitching, which you don't have much of, and it becomes a safety issue, when you're sending a team home on a three-hour commute, leaving at 2 o'clock in the morning, those types of things. It got voted in pretty easily by the general managers of the league."You may have seen or heard of the MLB's extra-inning rule, but this one's a little different. In the majors, to start the 10th inning, a runner is placed on second base, and that will happen every inning until the tie is broken. Teams in the GLSCL play an extra 10th inning before the rule is put in place. But that isn't the only difference. "The extra inning rule for the Great Lakes league is you play one extra inning, a 10th inning," Sluggers head coach Tyler Smith said. "If the game is still tied after that, we do sudden death. We do a coin flip, home team will call it, and whoever wins the coin flip gets to pick offense or defense. If you're on offense, you start with a guy on first base and nobody out. If you score the run, you win the game. If the defense stops you, they win the game. It's sudden death, so the most you play is 10 and a half innings.""I would think most teams want to play defense, if they win the coin flip," Laber added. "There's more pressure on the offense to score, theoretically. Because, you've gotta figure they're gonna give away an out by sacrificing the guy in scoring position, and then they've just gotta get two outs."As Laber hinted at, the implementation of the extra-inning rule was primarily to help with the health of teams' pitchers, something that was echoed by the Sluggers' coach and players alike. While classic baseball fans may not be in favor of the ruling, ultimately, it helps protect the health of the players."As an old-school baseball guy, I don't necessarily like it," Smith said. "But, as someone who understands, especially being a college coach in the world of arms and stress on arms. A lot of these guys have had a long season going through the spring so far, it makes perfect sense.""Like Coach Smith said, as an old-school baseball guy, it's a little weird," Sluggers outfielder Chris Franks said. "I'm not a huge fan of it. But, it's nice, especially in summer ball, to save guys' bodies, to save guys' arms. I understand the point of it.""I think it's a cool rule to have, since we have so many games during the week," fellow outfielder Tanner Powell said. "It saves players from getting injured and having restless nights. We get done earlier, don't have the chance of very late games like that, so that's good. I hadn't heard of it until we got in that scenario, but I don't think it makes that much of a difference." "The last thing we want is to blow out an arm because we wrung them out for 100 pitches," Smith continued. "If you get into a bunch of extra-inning games and play a 15-16 inning game, you're gonna use a bunch of arms and guys are gonna get hurt. It's a great idea to limit how many arms you have to throw, because we know going in that we're not gonna have to extend anybody too far."The more the rule is applied, the more familiar teams have gotten with it. For the Sluggers, however, this is a whole new experience. As an expansion team, fans and players alike are experiencing this rule for the first time. "Completely new concept (to me)," Smith said. "Especially the sudden death part of it. There's some places that do start with a guy on second, but starting with a guy on first and using a coin flip is a really unique rule to the Great Lakes League.""We've kinda played around with how to manage that scenario, but at the end of the day, we'll just see what happens," Smith added. "Hopefully, we're not in a lot of them, but if we are, it's kind of a fun deal where the one way we prepare is we have really good catchers. In that type of extra-inning game, you've gotta have really good catchers."With a 17-16 record and on a four-game winning streak, the Sluggers have seen plenty of close games down the stretch. On Friday, Flag City encountered a sudden-death situation, a game that went extra innings in a doubleheader, much like Laber's game in 2013. The Sluggers came up short, playing offense and losing to the Grand Lake Mariners at home as Rylan Mills struck out with two runners (one was the courtesy runner) on."This is by far the most number of sudden death games that we've played," Laber said. "I don't have the data, but when it got to be that we played so many, I decided that I better start keeping track of the fact that these games are happening. Then I figured an off-season project would be go back the previous three seasons, and go and list all them as well. I think we've got 10 of them in this season. Without proven data, I'd say that we haven't played a combined 10 sudden-death innings previous to this season. It's just been ridiculous. And I can't explain that, other than the oddity that stuff like that happens."