Brian Lair on WNYC, and yet to end the show today, we'll shift gears and do a little

sports talk, primarily about two stories linked by the two All-Star games this week. First up, and this is fairly

serious because it has to do with injury. Caitlin Clark and the WNBA, now in their all-star break

before Saturday night's game, Clark was to have captain one of the teams and participated in the

three-point shot contest, but she's had to bow out due to injury.

Then we'll talk briefly about a controversial development from Major League Baseball's All-Star

game on Tuesday night when Robo-Umps got involved in calling balls and strikes to take us

through these stories.

I'm joined by Barbara Barker, sports columnist and feature writer at Newsday. Hey Barbara, welcome back to the show. Great to have you.

Hey, Brian. Great to talk to you again. And listeners, we don't have much time for this, but

if anybody wants to weigh in on either of these two reffing or umpiring controversies,

212, 433, WNYC, 212, 433, 9692, call or text.

Let's talk about the reffing and the WNBA first.

This is the more serious question, and whether it's too lax, and it contributed to

Caitlin Clark's injury. What do you see?

I mean, I think it definitely did. Her coach definitely thinks it did. So just to let your,

you know, listeners know, Caitlin, this was going to be an unbelievably important week for the

WNBA because she was twice playing the defending champion Liberty in

New York where there's a lot of media and then there was an all-star game which is being hosted

by her team in Indiana this weekend and she got injured the game before the Liberty game which was

she's such a draw.

They had to move her game from Connecticut to the TD Garden in Boston because they had so many players that, I mean, people that wanted to see it.

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