Much Ado About Nothing

Avid readers of this blog -- raise your hands, both of you -- will recall that, in the wake of the Metsies' monumentally ignominious defeat to the Yankees in the first Subway Series game of the year, I swore that my days writing about the team were over.
Technically, since the piece below is about the All-Star Game, I am not reneging on that promise -- yet. Stay tuned, boys and girls...

In any case, after sitting through the three-and-a-half-hour tedium of the Fox broadcast, I cannot help but raise the question of whether the game as such has outlived itself as a viable and relevant spectacle. In my opinion, as a sporting event, Major League Baseball's yearly celebration of excellence is only marginally more interesting than the Pro Bowl, which is not very high praise at all.

This year, Bud Selig and his public relations minions had gone all out, and commissioned a bloated, never-ending pre-game show of almost Super Bowlian proportions, featuring the usual parade of geriatric ballplayers, accompanied as ever by the solemnly quivering baritone of the Master of Hyperbole himself, Joe Buck. Yet, despite all the earnest flag-waving, which included a well-intentioned salute to "Everyday All-Stars" by all five living presidents, the whole thing just came off as a huge Potemkin Village, an overly flashy undercard designed to mask the all-too-apparent shortcomings of the main event.

Which brings me to the game itself. Since 2003, the slogan for the "Midsummer Classic" has been "this one matters." Well, the fact that the winning league assures its future champion of home-field advantage in the World Series does not detract from the fact that the game itself is managed much like a mid-March Spring Training game.

In what has now become an unwritten rule, virtually every single player on the roster must be used, damn the torpedoes. Pitchers go an inning, two at the most, as double-switches are executed at a furious pace. Thus, the game is stripped of any semblance of continuity and edge, reducing it to a fragmented, haphazard (yes, I am aware that the American League has won the last 13 times -- this is what scientists refer to as a "probability anomaly") and decidedly lacklustre affair.

I realize, of course, that the All-Star Game is not going anywhere -- it is much too lucrative to do away with. Neither I am advocating its demise; however, MLB's potentates should take heed and allow the chosen managers to manage the thing much more like an actual competitive game, lest future All-Star Games fade into obscurity and end up taking place on scalding hot AstroTurf somewhere on the Hawaiian islands in November.