Sour grapes I say.
If, like me, you’d bet on a tie and no MVP you’d be pretty happy, and a billionaire!
Tell you what, everyone’s invited to be my guest in the Club Des Receveurs at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium next year. I’m buying the Expos and the entire Atlanta Braves pitching staff to boot. Even our AAA team will be better than most major league teams next year. Expos baseball is back baybeee!
(Note to all irate bookmakers: B-U-D S-E-L-I-G, he’s da guy you want.)
Didn’t know about Zito’s schedule, so it makes sense. But I think the try-to-get-em-all-playing-time deal is pretty dumb. If a starter’s just pitched, then save him till the late innings for a batter or two, or not at all.
And the idea of injury is just nonsense. I’d say a position player’s less likely to be injured - Canseco notwithstanding - because he’s not trying to throw 90 miles per hour. Sure, there’s the possibility that he’ll try to throw harder than he should, but I think most of the players are smart enough to know better. (Canseco wasn’t, IMO.) Heck, if we’re that concerned about injury, let’s just select the players with a computer and then put them into a virtual All-Star game. 
All I’m saying is that there had to have been viable alternatives other than ending the darn thing in a tie. That cheats everyone, most of all the fans.
I would still like to see John Olerud pitch. He was 15-0 his sophomore year in college and was first team All-American. That lanky 6’5" frame would work well on a lefty pitcher, plus it would be funny seeing him wearing the helmet on the mound;)
As for the All Star game… this is what it has become. A showcase for the players, with winning being of minor importance. Each year it has become less a matter of what the score is than whether the managers will use all their players. IIRC, Joe Buck spent most of the 8th inning commenting that Brenly and Torre “succeeded” in using all their position players.
Perhaps it is because of the expanded media coverage concerning the game. It was first televised around 1939, but with league expansion and greater media coverage, it has become harder and more important to make sure each team has a player get on the field.
Times are changing. I doubt that Ted Williams would have given Pete Reiser a big hug if Reiser robbed him of a homer in the 1941 All Star game. Besides, Williams would have known that he could have a chance to bat in the 9th inning to exact his revenge.
dantheman brought up the idea of having a mini home run derby to decide the game. Instead of that, what about having the winner of the real home run derby be the deciding factor? Giambi won the derby, so the AL would win the game. Okay, it’s a kind of a sucky idea, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.
lurkernomore–What, you don’t like to go watch the Lawn Guyland Ducks? Quackity quack quack quack!
But seriously, folks, he’s right. NY really is baseball heaven, especially since the coming of all the minor-league teams and the YES network. I love watching minor-league ball, both in person and on TV, because I find it more exciting. It’s like slapstick baseball.
I don’t care about the excuses. You heard me. I don’t care.
These multi-million dollar players are out on the field to play a game. That game by definition is played to its finish in baseball. That’s the way it is.
If they weren’t going to finish it, they should not have started it. I don’t care if you get the left fielder, the manager, the bat boy or the owner to pitch (What the hell, let Bud Selig pitch to both sides - I don’t care). Somebody should have pitched until one of those overpaid prima donas put one more out of the park. Probably a guarter of the guys in the field pitched in college and would have gotten a kick out of pitching in an All-Star game even if he were declared the “losing pitcher”.
But no…these professionals don’t work that way. I hope the next time they go to their drug dealers, he takes their money, weighs their drugs, waves it in front of their faces and then walks away saying, “I don’t want to use up all of my stash. It could be bad for future income production.”
Or the next time they go to their strip club…but you get the analogy.
Yes, I know it is a meaningless exhibition, but if you start something, you finish it. Working people paid hundreds of dollars to see their heros compete. If their rich asses are too good to do that they shouldn’t be on the field.
I can just see some father who took his kid to the game to watch. When the game is over he is explaining, “Well, I know I have told you that the correct way to play the game is to play it out, but you see, you are not worth as much money as these great athletes are. They don’t have to keep faith with the fans.”
Couldn’t even find them. They’re out in Suffolk somewhere. I’m at the city line. Probably haven’t been in Suffolk all year. Brooklyn is closer, and Shea the closest.
I just wanted to quack at you. (I think you can still get tickets to the Staten Island Yankees. It shouldn’t be a long drive for you, and the view from the park is really great.)
I’ve weighed in on this in the other thread, but…
… It was a travesty. I absolutely guarantee you that forty years from now, people will look back at this with utter disdain and say “Boy, that Selig guy sure was an idiot.”
Of course the game matters. If it didn’t matter, why are so many people angry about it? Nobody gets angry when a spring training game ends in a tie, because nobody cares about it, because they don’t matter. This game does matter, as proven by the fact that people care enough about the outcome to be angry about what happened.
The we-ran-out-of-pitchers excuse is ridiculous. Both pitchers in the 11th inning, Freddy Garcia and Vincente Padilla, were starting pitchers. They had pitched only two innings. Both were pitching ON THEIR SCHEDULED ROTATION DAY, so they weren’t on short rest. Garcia and Padilla both average way over six innings a game. Neither had been worked hard to that point. There is no reason they could not have gone a few more innings.
Even if the game isn’t over by that point, let a position player pitch. It happens. They’d get blasted and the game would come to a conclusion.
Like the major leagues needed THIS fiasco. Honest to God, is Bud Selig an NFL mole looking for ways to damage the major leagues? Surely to Christ the PR debacle this has become was rather easy to predict?
Thanks RickJay. You just cleared something up that I’ve been puzzling over–why was it supposed to be such an onerous burden for those pitchers to pitch more than 2 innings? I figured it had to have something to do with short rest or some such, but I guess not, if they were both pitching on their normal rotation day.
So that leaves us with only 2 possible explanations.
1: Major league pitchers are such fragile thoroughbreds that they are putting themselves in grave danger every time they step up to the mound to do what they are trained to do. Or…
2: The explanation for ending the game was bullshit.
I guess #1 is true to some extent, but the real answer is #2.
I didn’t catch from this thread if all the position players had been used. In a regular game (and as far as I know - the All-Star Game is played by regular rules), you just play until the game is:
If no one replies with the applicable regular season rule for playing with 8 players, I’ll try to find it. But that’s what should have happened. The concept of getting all the players in the game is an idea I may rant about separately; I want to see Barry Bonds for 9 innings; I want to see Randy Johnson pitch through the lineup (3 innings); I want to see the best players play, then if one wants to play managerial games in the 8th, the players are avalable to do it.
I am only glad that missing the ending of this game saved me from a heart attack.
I thought I saw it mentioned on TV that there’s a rule now that no pitcher can pitch more than 3 innings (or maybe it was even two); presumably, this rule was created so that every pitcher could conceivably get into the game. I guess.
BTW, Green Bean, the home-run derby winner could determine the AS winner only if it took place that night. I mean, could you imagine it? There’s a 7-7 tie, 11th inning, all players used, and The Bud comes out with this announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tie game and the managers have informed me that they have no players left. Therefore, since Jason Giambi of the Yankees won the Home Run Derby this year… the American League wins!” [loud chorus of boos]
They wouldn’t be booing because Giambi won, they’d be booing because it would be just a teeny anticlimactic (even worse if the fans weren’t there for the derby the previous night).
No problem. I think the SI yanks are about 45 minutes away. I haven’t been to a minor league game since I saw the AAA championships a few years back, which had some very unusual jeering - ground balls up the middle were followed by “Your brother would’ve had that”. (Billy Ripken was at SS)
Those last 2 pitchers should’ve gone 4 each. Torre made a big thing about not taking pithcers who threw Sunday so they’d be rested, then pitches guys an inning apiece (or less)
Dan,
You just hold a new Derby. Every guy currently in the lineup for each team gets 5 “outs”. Kinda like a shootout. Just each of the 9 guys and no decisions, so the coach doesn’t have to explain why he left someone on the bench. [sub] like the hockey coach who left Gretzky on the bench in '98 - idiot [/sub]
I know, lurker, that’s what I said earlier in this thread (although I was stealing someone’s idea - John Anderson from ESPN). Then again, maybe it was a different thread - there’s a lot of em out there right now!
[It would be 8 guys, though, not 9, right? Although I guess there’d be the fun of the game coming down to whether or not Vicente Padilla can homer!]
In a way, I agree with Milo. Yes, it’s a technically meaningless game, and can be played by somewhat different rules. Including ending in a tie.
But two things. Numero uno, the All-Star Game is a showcase event, not a spring-training game. However you do it differently, that fact should be taken into account.
Numero two-o, if you want to play it by different rules, those rules should still be set ahead of time. If it’s been several years now, as Milossarian implies, that they’ve made a fetish of playing every last player, then they should have seen this coming, and made appropriate rules changes.
And even if Selig got caught by surprise Tuesday night, then he could have made the announcement at the end of the ninth that the game would only go eleven. And if he was so totally oblivious to what was going on that he didn’t wake up to the problem until the eleventh (this is the bozo that is running MLB? Even I didn’t think Selig was that dumb, but maybe he is!), then he should have at least insisted that they play 12, and give both teams another at-bat after the decision was made to end the game prematurely.
As Boswell said this morning,
So AFAIAC, they can do the All-Star Game any way they want to. They can decide that 11 or 12 innings is as far as the game will go. They can change the rules to allow players to leave the game and return later. They can do whatever they want, as long as it does what it’s supposed to do - get all the bright lights of the game out there on the field.
(Preferably in a way that doesn’t pull the game’s best-known position players out of the lineup after three innings so that somebody we’ve never heard of, but who had a good first half, can be on the field. As Bill James once said, if they want an All-Mediocrities-Who-Had-Good-First-Halves Game, they could play it in Cleveland every year.)
But whatever they decide, they need to decide it before it happens. This is baseball: they go from no mention of contraction, to trying to kill a hundred-year-old franchise, in a span of weeks. They go from the All-Star Game being played under regular rules, to ending it in a tie, in the space of half an inning. Who knows what they’ll go from zero to sixty on next?
As Rocky Balboa said in the original Rocky, “You shoulda planned ahead.”
I do think that they shouldn’t be in such a rush to get everyone playing time in the All Star game, but fer Chrissakes, while Garcia and Padilla were pitching on their regular turns in the rotation… Garcia, at least, is also pitching tomorrow. He could have gone 6 or 7 innings if he needed to, but then he’d have been unavailable for his scheduled start in a game that actually matters (assuming we have a postseason, anyway; otherwise, the entire season is really just a bunch of exhibition games, in a way). I, for one, would have been less than entirely pleased with this result.
Here’s my solution… probably stupid, but eh, so what. Make the All Star break a few days longer, and allow players to come back in after they’ve been subbed out, but only in extra innings. If we ever have this problem again, that ought to fix it pretty easily.
Some people are saying, ‘Who cares what the result of the All-Star Game is, it doesn’t mean anything. The outcome of this game doesn’t really matter.’
Well, obviously it does matter, or this discussion (and hundreds of other ones taking place around the country) wouldn’t be happening.
In the grand scheme of things, do any games “matter?” Sure, teams play the regular season games with a goal of trying to reach the playoffs. But the ultimate goal is to entertain the fans, and in doing so, make money for the league so the teams can keep entertaining.
This year’s ASG was entertaining, it made money. Mission accomplished, right? Wrong. Fans were disappointed (myself included), and therefore the league’s attempt at reaching the “ultimate goal” has been stymied.
Again, in the grand sceme of things, no sporting events really matter. It’s only a game. What matters is, are people watching?
How could this All-Star problem have been avoided, and how should it be fixed? I don’t care, that’s Bud’s problem. He better fix it though, or soon none of the games-- regular season, post season or any other-- won’t matter at all.
Bottome line, baseball is entertainment. If it ceases to entertain, then what the hell is it?
Calvinball anyone? 
Happy
I dunno how much money it made, Happy. It had low ratings, from what I hear (something like down 9% from last year).
You’re right, dantheman.
But I’m sure the game and all the activities surrounding it still made MLB a little dough. Ratings for the homerun derby were up from last year, after all.
Maybe they should scrap the game and just have other comptitions: kickball, pickle, All-Star Jeopardy!, a dunk tank w/ Bud Selig inside, picket sign relays, wind sprints across the infield…the possibilities are endless!
Happy
Happy: That’s a damn good idea. I would totally be into watching big-shot major league players playing Steal the Bacon. How funny would that be?