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MLB

Marathon All-Star Game Highlights Flaws

Posted Jul 16, 2008 6:30AM By Andrew Johnson (RSS feed)

Filed Under: MLB All-Star Game

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Years from now when people look back on the 79th All-Star Game, they'll remember a few things. First and foremost, they'll remember the celebration of Yankee Stadium, one of baseball's last remaining living museums, in its final season. Right alongside that, they'll think fondly of Josh Hamilton. Even if you're sick of hearing about his intense battle with drug addiction, the sight of him launching 500-foot homers into the black New York sky at the Home Run Derby won't soon be forgotten.

And perhaps after that, they'll remember the actual game itself for its record length -- 15 innings over four hours and 50 minutes. It's safe to say nobody will be thinking of the final All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium as a classic.

Part of that was the ugliness of the game. This Midsummer Classic had everything -- blown calls by the umpire, poor baserunning, way too much Aaron Cook, epic offensive squanders and even three errors by poor Dan Uggla.

But the flaws in the structure of the current incarnation of the All-Star Game were also on not-so-sparkling display. Major League Baseball still has the best showcase event in American professional sports, but it's not above a little cosmetic overhaul now and again.

With that in mind, here are four things that baseball should change to improve the All-Star Game. (There was plenty of time to come up with a list Tuesday night).

- End interleague play. The great thing about the All-Star Game used to be that it was the only chance all year to see the best of the AL and NL match up other than in the World Series. Interleague games have made the novelty of the event obsolete, and while fans in Chicago and New York might miss the intra-city rivalries, no one anywhere is going to be pining away for those classic late June Rockies-Royals series.

- Stop trying to assign artificial importance to the event. The problem with the whole "This Time It Counts" mantra is that while it might count for something, it doesn't seem to count for anything too significant. Home field advantage doesn't matter in baseball like it does in football or basketball, not to mention the fact that there doesn't seem to be much sense of urgency when the outcome of an almost completely unrelated and casual event in July determines the location of a critically important event in October.

This would also free up managers to treat the event like the exhibition it is, instead of forcing them to straddle the fence as Terry Francona did Tuesday night -- managing casually and trying to get as many players in the game as possible early on, then scrambling once the game plodded on into extra innings and he ran out of players on the bench and in the bullpen.

- Stop requiring that every team be represented at the All-Star Game. When the managers treat the game like an exhibition -- a practice that doesn't appear to be ending any time soon -- you end up with the worst players on the team playing at the end of the game. When a game goes to extra innings, that means even more unnecessary face time for the likes of Cristian Guzman. Guzman, the Nationals' lone representative and a man with a perfectly mediocre 102 OPS+, ended up getting three at-bats and playing six innings Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. Even the fans in Washington probably would have preferred to see Jose Reyes or Pat Burrell or any of the numerous more qualified NL hitters.

- Start the game at a semi-reasonable hour. This is baseball's premier showcase event, the one day on the sports calendar it gets all to itself. By starting the game so late it excludes a key bloc of fans -- children. I'm not naive enough to think the All-Star Game should go back to the afternoon, not with the advertising dollars in primetime television, but the first pitch by Cliff Lee wasn't even thrown until after 8:45PM ET, a time when many kids are being tucked into bed. If the game started (actually really started) by 7PM, or even 8PM at the latest, young fans could still watch a few innings, with the added side benefit that they'd probably be asleep by the time Guzman got into the game.

Tags: aaron+cook, AaronCook, cliff+lee, CliffLee, cristian+guzman, CristianGuzman, dan+uggla, DanUggla, jose+reyes, JoseReyes, josh+hamilton, JoshHamilton, pat+burrell, PatBurrell, terry+francona, TerryFrancona

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