Wednesday, July 06, 2011

All Star Bullshit

Tom Verducci HERE has several suggestions on how to improve the All-Star Game, but merely skims over the biggest atrocity: that they've for some reason given the game weighted meaning by giving the winner home-field advantage in the World Series!
Home-field advantage in the World Series is on the line. That's no small prize. Teams with the home-field advantage (which has become mostly about opening at home, considering we haven't seen a Game 7 in nine years) have won 12 of the 16 World Series in the wild-card era. Home teams are 51-34 (.600) in individual Series games.
That's cool; there is some real meaning attached to the game in Phoenix next Tuesday. However, you are asked to run it like a school recess kickball game -- a very crowded game -- making sure everybody gets in and everybody has a good time. These are two competing agendas that, try as you might, cannot be balanced.
That is, of course, fucking insane - teams play 162 games over 6 months so that if they make it to the most important games of their lives, they're controlled by a fucking mid-season exhibition game in which the players who are chosen by the fans hope to get out of the game as soon as possible so they can clown around?  Or leave?  What the fuck.  You may win 83 games, to my 110, but if in a pretend game 4 months ago someone on your All-Star game hit the gw-rbi against some shitty relieveer who was only there because every team has to be repesented and then everybody is supposed to play? Fucking absurd.  Oh, and the pitcher who leads the majors in wins isn't even playing this year, therein crippling my team that much more?

Fucking hell.  If you MUST have this stupid game go on (which more and more seems to be an excuse to have Fat-Ass Chris Berman on tv braying "back back back back!" during the insufferable 10-hour home run contest), trim the rosters so the games aren't 7 hours long thanks to 233 pitching changes, and make the outcome MEAN ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING!!  It's a goddam exhibiton game!

Grrrr.

The only decent thing that's come out of this gigantic waste of time in the last 20 years is, did anyone else not realize how nice SJP's tittays were?  Nom nom nom!

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