Heck, let ‘em have ghost runners, too! It’ll be just like Wiffle Ball in the ol’ backyard!
Maybe bring back the days of 2 Allstar games. They used to play 2 - explains why, say, Willie Mays played in more A-S games than MLB seasons. Picture this: A Friday night game, lineups chosen by the fans. Saturday off. Sunday afternoon, lineups chosen by the players/coaches/managers. Easy to get position players in - 18 innings of work. You’d have a long break, so you could set your pitchers up easily - haven’t pitched in 3 days? Go 3 Friday, Sunday off. Only used 3 or 4 pitchers Friday? Use guys 1 inning Sunday. If it looks like you’re running out in the 11th, most of the Friday guys could go 1 inning, right? Give you 4 emergency innings. Calling it after 15 would be a lot more acceptable. Only 1 A-S game ever went that long, anyway.
Hey, put Bud Lite Selig in that dunk tank. Make it a cylinder 20 feet tall, smooth glass sides, with 10’ of that red ink he says baseball is awash in. Buy a Twins ticket, win a chance to dump him. Have Expos fans have a pool on how long it takes until the ink stops bubbling up. Winner gets the team.
Other special All-Star competition ideas:
Dodge ball,
tag,
Red Rover (“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Curt Schilling right over!”),
king of the mountain,
tiniest testicle contest,
“Cookin’ with Resin Fritter Bake-off,”
most durable athletic cup…
Happy, having a slow day at work
I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the lack of a winner in the All-Star Game. It’s an exhibition, made more meaningless by interleague play. And I don’t care which steroid-enhanced bozo wins the Home Run Derby.
But some people still care about the game, which is all the more reason to view Bud Selig’s latest pronouncements with stunned disbelief.
Our Bud is “heartbroken” over the outcome of the game, lost a night’s sleep, and would have handled it differently if he had a chance - he would have had a player make the announcement about when the game would be called a tie.
Yup, that’s Bud’s solution - make a player the scapegoat. And there can be no one who follows baseball who thinks Bud’s heart beats in time to anything other than a cash register.
Ladies and gentlemen, the fans have voted. Bud Selig is officially the biggest shithead in the history of Organized Baseball.
The dunk tank idea is too good for him. He should tour the nation’s ballparks, standing in a makeshift batter’s box at those pitching booths in the concessions area, so we could all have a turn at beaning him.
I omitted mention of the latest blubbering Selig claim about financial difficulties - the team that might not make payroll, and the other that’s awash in red ink and teetering on the edge, only he won’t reveal the name of either team.
Yeah, we trust you, Bud. Your word is your bond.
uh, JAckman…re-examine my dunk tank…smooth walls…10’ deep, walls another 10’ above him… bubbles stop… he’ll only get dunked once…
Yeah, but with your dunk tank, only one person gets the satisfaction of doing Bud harm.
And I hear drowning is painless.
Drowning is painless? From whom do you hear this?
I believe his last words were: ‘Glub, glub, glub.’
Happy
The Home Run Derby was also a source of embarrassment for Selig, the Brewers, and Milwaukee, because the whole country saw how leaky that multi-million-dollar convertible roof is. The taxpayers who helped pay for that thing oughtta demand a refund. Will Miller Brewing ask for a refund on the money they paid for naming the park?
Ever tasted Miller beer? It tastes like water dripped off a roof into the bottle.
I like Miller Genuine Draft once in a while.
Well, it was a fiasco even before it was built - they had the crane accident that resulted in death (three workers, I believe), and apparently the design wasn’t quite the same as the end product, so now the architect is fighting the workers or the team or someone…
So any team not in contention for the World Series should just concede every game for the rest of the season? After all, they are risking needless, expensive injuries for a result that will mean nothing to them…
Were I commissioner:
-
Use the coaches to pitch the 12th+ innings. Willie Randolph was pitching for Giambi during the Home Run Derby. He’s in uniform. Put him in. The National League has equivalent coaches. Stick them in. Put Yount in. Hell, put in Warren Spahn. Or Ueker. Any injuries would have no effect on the pennant races, and I bet the fans would have loved it. Even if not, it’s a plausible ending
-
Now that the curse of interleague play seems
entrenched, why not change the all-star game? Make three teams-- East, West, and Central. The appropriate divisions of *both * leagues contribute to the team. Add two days to the break and have each team play the others
once. Instead of expanding the rosters and having 14 or 16 teams represented on each roster, you only need to pick from 9-11 teams. You add regional subplots. Everybody plays more.
You see improbable teammates. Fans of the Royals and Pirates at least get Sosa and Thome playing for them. the Eastern team looks good with Yankees, Red sox, and Braves, but can it beat a Western team with Mariners, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Giants?
Welllll… Maybe not Spahn, okay? 
He’s like 90 years old. Last thing I want on my conscience is seeing a old man get a liner back at his head. Unless you mean that the format would be like the Derby itself, in which the pitcher’s behind that netting thingy.
That sounds good - and it would be inventive enough to keep people interested. Because you’d be picking three teams, if the roster was at the same limit you might wind up with a few players every year who don’t really deserve to be there. But that’s ok - it’ll even out, I bet.
From the Society of People Who Only Went Down For The Second Time. They have a website.
To please lurkernomore, I’ve come up with a candidate for the proposed dunk tank - Astros General Manager Gerry Hunsicker, this year’s nominee for the Dan Duquette Turd of The Year Award.
In comments appearing in the 7/12 USA Today, Hunsicker said he thought it would take something like teams missing payrolls for fans to realize how serious baseball’s financial problems are. “We’ve been trying to tell people we have a tough environment, and the more we say it the more people don’t want to believe us. It’s going to take blood in the streets and bodies lying there (italics mine) for people to see we have got real live problems here.”
Uh-huh. The world of baseball executives - it’s a dangerous, life-threatening place, like Afghanistan or Chechnya! Only with expense accounts.
And maybe people have noticed that the owners have simultaneously been squealing and doling out the big paychecks for years, while releasing scant, disputed financial figures.
Modified dunk tank idea - use the conventional tanks like the ones at the county fair, and rotate owners and GMs to serve as dunkees. All they’d have to do is keep babbling about their financial worries, and people would line up by the thousands to dunk them. It’d raise more than enough money to meet payroll. Add in a few writers and ESPN sportscasters, and it would be a fabulous source of income.
As old Elvis C. said, I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
I used to be a big baseball fan, but as the years go by, baseball’s continuing attitude problem has made it more difficult to enjoy the game. The cynicism over the money game is not even hidden anymore, when you see teams throwing in the towel before the All-Star break, selling off players and talking about “rebuilding” for years before they become a contender again.
Now this, where the commissioner didn’t have the balls to tell the fans at the game what was happening, turn around the next game to say that two teams may not make payroll, then turn around again a few days later to take back what he just said.
Does anyone really believe a word Yer Bud says anymore?
Put it this way. Who is more credible: the Commish or Yassir Arafat?
Like I said, a few years back, this would have hurt. Now, I’ll laugh and turn to the comics page. They’re just another bunch of clowns in the circus I like to call Life.
I can’t resist… cite please?
heh.
Zoinks! Look, Gerry Whatsyourname. Has it ever - even once - occurred to you that one reason fans are falling all over themselves trying to save the game for you is that you yourselves put the game in this position? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question. Of course it hasn’t occurred. And get that finger out of your ear. You don’t know where it’s been.