Look, I say it every year:
“The All-Star teams are chosen by ballot. A chimp could fill out an All-Star ballot. The best and brightest of each league are not necessarily playing in the All-Star game.”
Damn straight!
Having moved to the US a few years ago, i’m a rather recent baseball fan. One of the weirdest things about baseball, to me at least, was the contradictions that seem to go with the All-Star game.
The whole country gets worked up about this big occasion and millions of people seem to see it as an important part of the season, yet everyone whines if a few, unfortunate mega-millionaires don’t get to take the field and have to–gasp!–sit on the bench for the whole game. As spooje says, this isn’t fucking little league.
And what’s with the selection process? They pretend they want to give the game to the fans by letting people vote. But they also recognize that sports fans are notorious for picking personal favourites over the guy with the best current form, so they allow the fans to pick the starting line-ups, but then let managers etc. pick reserves so they can compensate for the fans’ parochialism.
As Rilchiam says, a chimp could fill out a ballot. The very first game i attended at Camden Yards, i got to fill out a ballot (does that make me a chimp? :)). I’d barely paid any attention to baseball before that, and didn’t even know all the Orioles players, let alone players from across the whole American League. I voted for Cal Ripken because that seemed to be what everyone else was doing, and then happily went along selecting random players i’d never heard of. And, looking around and listening to other people’s conversations, i knew that i was far from the only person adopting such an unscientific approach.
Having to have at least one representative from every team is a joke. Sorry, but if your lame-ass team has no-one worthy of making an All-Star team, then suck it up, crybabies.
I also don’t see the need to change pitchers every inning or so. Put your best starter on the mound, and play it like a regular game. If he can go five or six innings without getting hit all over the park, great. This certainly would have prevented the problem of last year’s tied game. And if the need to keep a pitcher in for a few innings puts him back a game or two in his club’s rotation, bad luck. Either you want the All-Star game to be a proper game, or you don’t.
Much of my perspective on this issue comes from watching Australian sports, where our equivalent of the All-Star game is considered very important, and everything possible is done to win.
In rugby league, for example, the All-Star game is known as the “State of Origin” game. Most rugby league players come from the states of Queensland or New South Wales, so the game is between representatives of those two states. But the teams are selected based on where a player started his career, not where he is playing now, so you often have people who play on the same team during the season playing against each other in the State of Origin games.
The teams for these games are not selected by the fans, but by selection committees made up of experts whose job is to follow rugby league. They pick the teams based on form, and some old, about-to-retire guy doesn’t get a spot just because he’s been around a long time and everyone likes him. The game is too important for that.
And the game is played full-on. It’s not like the pathetic hockey All-Star game, which is little more than a skating exhibition, with no hits. The hits in State of Origin rugby league are some of the biggest ones of the year, and that’s what the crowd comes to see.
The upshot of all this is that the State of Origin games (it’s a best of three series) are about the most exciting, skilfull and aggressive games of the year. I think that’s what an All-Star game should be all about.
Sorry, I disagree. Throwing a pitcher out there for a full start could cost his team a game or two, which could cost them the post-season. That isn’t fair to the team and that team’s fans. Plus, you have conflicts of interest. Suppose Scioscia pitched Mulder for 6 innings, making him unavailable for the next several days. And the first series after the All-Star break for the A’s is against the Angels, and Mulder is now unable to start in that series as he was originally scheduled. Sounds fishy? Of course. Or what if it was Joe Torre giving Pedro a full start, making him unavailable for a full series, during a tight race? That’s the sort of thing managers are trying to avoid by giving light innings.