King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Can the baseball All-Star Game be saved? And is it even worth saving?

Read more: Sports, Baseball, Bud Selig, King Kaufman, Sports Daily

July 11, 2006 | Baseball's All-Star Game needs fixing. The Midsummer Classic, renewed Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, is stuck in limbo. It's part silly exhibition, part deadly serious decider of postseason fates.

The two parts don't mix. And if the All-Star Game isn't already a joke, it's getting very close. Want to elicit derisive snorts among baseball fans? Use "This time it counts!" as a punch line. It never misses.

This is the first year I've seriously heard a commentator compare baseball's All-Star Game to the NFL's, the Pro Bowl, and I have to say the comparison sounded pretty fair to me. It's a rule of life as crucial as not playing poker with guys named Doc: Don't let anything you care about get compared to the Pro Bowl.

Thanks mostly, but not entirely, to historical factors beyond the control of mere mortals, the All-Star Game was already well on the way to irrelevance in 2002 when the dreaded tie game forced commissioner Bud Selig to make a decision, which is never a good thing. He made a typically Seligian move by declaring that to fix the All-Star Game, he would change the way the World Series works.

Selig's the kind of guy who fixes his muffler by getting a louder stereo.

The problem at hand was that the teams ran out of pitchers to throw in extra innings, the result of the effort to get every player in the game. Rather than telling the managers "Stop doing that," Selig declared that the winning league in the All-Star Game would have home-field advantage in the World Series.

It's true, players have begun to take the game a little more seriously since then. You don't see the starters running to catch planes after the fourth inning anymore, though again, this was a problem that could have been dealt with by asking the players to please stop doing that, wait another hour.

But it's still an exhibition game. It's still one that some players would rather skip in favor of three vacation days, one that teams often wish their star players would skip to rest and nurse injuries.

And it isn't a game between the best players in the two leagues, which at least would lend some sense of fairness to the bestowing of home-field advantage to the winning side, but a game between players chosen because of a mix of results, personal popularity and being on last year's pennant winner.

Next page: It may be time to embrace the All-Star Game's irrelevance