from Amazon
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
All-Star Game: Begone!
King Kauffman captures the issue here with this blurb:
The All-Star Game is just an unfortunate casualty...embrace its irrelevance.
It seems that baseball must go through divorce court every time you have a major rule change. In the NHL, and I’m sure other sports, they’ll make changes to see if they can make things better. One of the best things the NHL / Quebec did was abandon the All-Star game for a year, and replaced it with Rendez-vous ‘87:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendez-vous_’87
A good rule of thumb is: If this rule didn’t exist, would this rule be made to exist? If there were no All-Star game, would someone think: “Hey, let’s get some of the best players from both leagues in the middle of the season, and play a game, make sure they all get in the game, and make the winner get HFA for the World Series!”. Uhhh, no.
The All-Star game has to exist, because it’s a money-maker for owners, broadcasters, and pension funds. You just need to change it around a bit. You can make it the Young Stars against the Old Timers. Or really anything. You can even change it every few years. Or every year. It’s irrelevant, so, as King says, embrace its irrelevance, and have fun with it.
Every year this time I get thoroughly bored with two things: Articles that talk about how “unfair” the All-Star selection process is (WhoTF cares!?), and articles that talk about how meaningless the ASG has become. What a waste of precious cyber-space.