Yes, the All-Star Game Is Stupid. But It's Always Been Stupid.

by Ryan Dahn

You can almost pity the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Come July, sports fans are inevitably treated to a seemingly infinite amount of columns on why the All-Star Game is “broken”, how players and fans used to “care” about the game (Pete Rose running over Ray Fosse in 1970 is always cited), and how to “fix” the All-Star Game. The deluge of All-Star Game hate has itself become maddening.

At the risk of sounding like one of those jabbering commentators, here is my opinion on the venerable Midsummer Classic.*

It’s true that the Classic has its flaws; the most concise explanation of its failings that I have heard was from Jack “JackO” O’Connell, on Bill Simmons’ podcast:

“I think [the All-Star Game] is like the NFL Pro Bowl. It’s an honor [for a player] to be named, and they always name that in your Hall of Fame resume, but you actually don’t want to get on a plane when you could have three days off. You don’t want to get on a plane and play in this meaningless game.”

That last sentence sums it up perfectly. According to the MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement, baseball players get at maximum twenty-one off days all season, including the three days of the All-Star Break. After rainouts and makeup games players get only seventeen or eighteen days off out of a 183-day season. Essentially one-sixth of a player’s rest days come in the form of the All-Star Break — why would you want to waste those precious off-days to play in a meaningless game?

It’s easy to understand why CC Sabathia did not seem too disappointed that he was snubbed — he had a vacation in the Bahamas planned for the break!

The players who do come to the game know that it is irrelevant, and this apathy is immediately apparent to fans through their play on the field. We watch sports in the hope of watching teams compete to the best of their capacity — to make every effort in their power to win. But that effort is not made at the modern All-Star Game, which is what makes it so dull.

It makes a mockery of baseball’s “This time, it counts!” slogan for the Midsummer Classic, introduced in the wake of the 2002 debacle, when Commissioner Bud Selig was forced to end the game in a tie as both teams had run out of players. To ‘fix’ the game, Selig decided that the league that won the game would have home-field advantage during the World Series, coining the slogan to market the game more effectively.

But the players certainly don’t play like it counts. If MLB wants the game to count, they need to play it like a real baseball game, not one where the real goal of the game is to have every member of each team play. The starting pitcher should go at least six innings and the starting lineup should play the whole game. But this will never happen, as teams fear for their starting pitchers and MLB believes that every player should play. Determining something as important as home-field advantage in the World Series through a joke of a baseball game is a travesty. (If you ask me, it should go to the team with the best record, like in the NBA and NHL.)

While it’s true that the old system for determining home-field advantage — rotating it year by year — was dumb as well, as SI’s Joe Posnanski says, at least then we didn’t have to pretend that the All-Star Game ‘counted’. It never counted and never will count. Maybe in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was no interleague play, no MLB Extra Innings cable package, no ESPN or MLB Network — no cable networks at all! — when most fans could not see anyone in the other league except in the World Series, the All-Star Game was played with more intensity. I’m unsure — there’s probably some truth to those stories we hear every year, but I tend to chalk most of them up to nostalgia — “back in my day…” type criticism. People always think that things were better in the past. It’s just the way we are.

But the Midsummer Classic is never going to be the way it was back then — imagined or real — we just need to accept that. Today there’s no difference between the AL and the NL, and we can see any player we want at any time through the magic of the Internet, SportsCenter, and Baseball Tonight. The All-Star Game is only unique in that the lineups are different; we know who all of the players are.

Maybe I’m being cynical, but I don’t think there’s any way to ‘fix’ All-Star Game, as most commentators propose every July. Putting home-field advantage in World Series in the hands of a dumb exhibition game — a game that since its inception has always been a dumb exhibition — is foolish. MLB should just embrace the inherent stupidity of the Midsummer Classic.


*Incidentally, here’s how I envision an All-Star Game Power Rankings right now:

1. MLB. I know, I know, I’ve hated on it, but of the four, it’s the oldest and it has the most tradition. Maybe more importantly, there’s nothing else to do on the second or third Tuesday in July. Unlike the other three, the MLB All-Star game runs unopposed. Unrelatedly, isn’t it fascinating that the day after the MLB All-Star Game is the only day of the calendar year when there are no games played in any of the four major sports?

2. NBA. Yes, there’s absolutely no defense — the final scores of the last three NBA All-Star Games were 148-143, 141-139, and 146-119. But, dunks. Oops. Combine that with no defense and you get a bunch of ridiculous plays that are extremely fun to watch. It’s like watching NBA players play a game of Ball Up Street Ball — for one night, it’s pretty cool.

3. NHL. Only for its “picking teams” idea from last year — why hasn’t the NBA done that yet? Otherwise, pretty lame.

4. NFL. Has anyone ever watched the Pro Bowl?