I thought the Homerun-Off was a pretty fun and unexpected part of an otherwise dumb game. I couldn’t help but giggle with glee when Schwarber hit 3/3 as easy as I pull on socks. The camera work was just awful (golf is making you look bad!) and the commentary and player Q&A deep into cringefoul territory.
Schwarber won the MVP award? Sorry I’m just finding this out. Alonso and Rooker hit three run homers in the actual freaking game. Against competetive pitches. Manfred is such a fucking joke, lol.
Kris Bubic of the Royals did not have a good outing. He faced 4 batters, retiring just one. Allowed a hit, a single, then a 3-run homer before retiring his 4th (and last) batter.
His all-star ERA is 81.0.
Still not quite as bad as Atlee Hammaker, who, in 1983, faced 9 batters and allowed 7 earned runs, including 2 homers and a triple. That was his only all-star appearance. His all-star ERA is 94.5.
For those who didn’t get to see it, they mic’d up Clayton Kershaw for a couple batters and it’s pretty cool.
If you want to see all the mic’d up moments they’re here. Not really as good as Kershaw’s. But it’s definitely my favorite part of the ASG!
If only there was a process in which to impeach a baseball commissioner.
Yes, because his home runs won the game.
What Schwarber did was the actual freaking game, and he won the actual freaking game for the NL. It was tied after the 9th, and the game wasn’t over. You may not like how the game was done at that point, but that’s how the rules were. Schwarber absolutely deserved the MVP, because at that point the NL was down 3-1 in the HR contest, and his performance was dominant enough that Alonso didn’t even have to come out. Hitting 3 HRs on 3 swings at that pivotal moment was amazing.
The pitches may not have been competitive, but he was still competing against other hitters. It was still a huge feat. Nobody else did what he did. (Alonso maybe could have, but didn’t get a chance to try since the game was over before it was his turn.)
I mean, you could argue that the All-Star Game wasn’t an actual game at all, since the rules were weird and its outcome has very little impact on anything. In which case, who cares who was named MVP?
That’s all that needed to be said. Schwarber didn’t hit any home runs. He went 0 for 2 with a walk. But I must give credit where credit is due: he is the MVP of batting practice meatballs.
You could have just said that you don’t think it takes any skill to compete in the Home Run Derby and left it at that.
In a game with few stakes he came through in the only moment that was full of pressure to perform. Due to its uniqueness it’s the only moment that anyone will remember from the game.
Well that’s great and all, but it’s nothing compared to being down 6-0 and hitting a three run homer off an elite reliever (who’s only surrendered one home run so far this season.)
It’s an exhibition game, so I really don’t care if they use a silly contest as a tiebreaker.It’s just the absurdity of naming an MVP of a baseball game who did nothing during the game to earn it.
And the funny part? MLB broke the rules they put in place for such an eventuality. The announcers even discussed the existing rule during the ninth inning.
Baseball has long had tie ballgames. So the game ended tied 6-6 and so what? What’s wrong with that? If you’re going to omit extra innings, then they played to a draw, and the AL made a nice comeback to do so. The meatball contest means nothing.
Isn’t the game’s outcome still the determining factor for where the World Series is played? (Which team gets home field advantage on which days.) It’s not a big deal, but they’d need another way to decide that if they left it at a tie.
(IMHO a coin flip would be good enough for me.)
They ended that.
Since 2017, the team with the better regular season record in the World Series earns home-field advantage.
It was, from 2003 through 2016. It no longer is.
Yeah I Googled, that ended in 2017. I could have looked it up and not wasted my time. Meh.
So it really is no different from any other “all-star” exhibition from other sports now.
Best record doesn’t make much sense if most games are intraleague. What’s wrong with just alternating it year by year. Another brilliant idea from Manfred, probably.
No perfect solution for home field, but I do think the old alternating years was the most fair.
Since all teams now play every other team during the regular season, the home field could be determined by the winner of the regular season series between the two WS teams.
I agree that alternating AL or NL every year is plenty good enough for the meaningless drivel that is the ASG.
But this bit puzzles me:
IMO a win’s a win, a loss is a loss, and a season record of 90-72 is better than one of 89-73. I fail to see what inter- or intra- league play has to do with it. I’m not disagreeing with you; I just can’t understand whatever point you’re trying to make.
Well, right now I’d say the Al is the weaker league with the Central being the weakest division. If Detroit went to the WS with 100 wins, it would be less impressive than the Cubs getting there with 99 wins. Because teams play more games against their division opponenets, although not as many as in the past.
Gotcha. Which is essentially the same argument as in the NFL about certain teams drawing an “easy” or “hard” schedule, and how that biases the end-of-season results.
Given all the other random variables in play over a batch of teams over the course of a season, this sorta reminds me of the drunk looking under the streetlight for his keys because the light there is better.
IOW, we’re trying to find some systemic cause to explain an unrealistically outsized portion of the results variance. While the reality is it’s mostly random and only a teeny smidgen systematic. Why do we/they do that? Because it gives the talking heads something to talk about; the happenstance randomness of a season’s play is hard to talk about, and definitely hard to create two reasoned but differing opinions about so as to generate controversy & buzz.