Hey, Bud, let's party!

Selig whittles away at tradition with a dull blade

Bud Selig looks at Mona Lisa and wants to fix that crooked little smile. He hears the faint tapping of Paul McCartney's metronome on Blackbird and wants to remix "The White Album." He plays an All-Star Game and wants it to be the World Series.

Poor Bud Selig.

Imagine going through life unable to appreciate subtle imperfection ... always putting too much salt on your food because nothing ever tastes quite right, always wishing your kid wouldn't color the sun purple because you have no imagination.

What color is the sun in Bud Selig's world, anyway?

Like Michael Jackson looking in the mirror, Selig looks at baseball and says, "What next?" But as quickly as you can turn raw, natural beauty into something slicker and more marketable, you can also mangle it beyond recognition.

Thank goodness somebody had the good sense to swat the scalpel away from Selig when he suggested that the players wear special All-Star uniforms instead of their individual team jerseys. It's as if Selig looks at the very things that make the All-Star Game special and somehow sees them as the things that are holding it back.

It's just unfortunate that the public outcry came too late to thwart this ludicrous World Series connection.

Yet here it is. Like a joke that's run amok. Perhaps we didn't even realize he was serious when he suggested it. And perhaps he was unable to detect the sarcasm in our voices when we said, "Oh, yeah, that's a great idea." See, Bud, when the accent is on "great" like that, it means we're kidding. It's a bad idea. A horrible idea. The All-Star Game is the All-Star Game and the World Series is the World Series. But what makes us think he would understand that? This is the same man who shrugged in front of his hometown crowd and let a baseball game end in a draw.

That shrug will be the lasting image of Selig's tenure as commissioner. A guy who didn't know what to do. And his instinct was to go against the most basic principle of the game: no ties. It was only the 11th inning, for goodness sake. Get to the 15th or 16th, then start shrugging. And even then, you finish the game. Every kid in the schoolyard knows that. Mom can scream down the street all she wants.

To distract the lynch mob gathering at the gate, Selig concocted this mysterious notion that there was some competitive element missing from the All-Star Game. And his solution -- giving home-field advantage in the World Series to the winner -– again went against a fundamental principle of baseball that says exhibition stats and results do not count.

Want to put a bounty on the All-Star Game? How about cash? Ballplayers have been known to put a little giddy in their up when there are some Benjamins down the base line. Yeah, money would have been far too logical as a motivational tool. Instead, we're going to let some token All-Star from Tampa Bay or Detroit have a hand in deciding a World Series schedule. That's like letting me have a say in AOL-Time Warner's strategic planning. Oh, yeah, that's a great idea!

The diminishing status of the All-Star Game isn't the result of any one catastrophic change, but the result of a series of small alterations: the rise of the Home Run Derby as the showcase event, the lost thrill of AL vs. NL due to interleague play, the ever-changing and convoluted voting system and, now, the nutty World Series bounty.

But, you know, things change and we adjust. So fill the cooler and marinate the steaks. The All-Star Game may have lost a little of its old-world charm, but it still gives us something to look forward to on a Tuesday night in July. I'll take it, faults and all. Bud can go right back to the drawing board.

David Vecsey's Voice of Reason column appears weekly on SI.com.

 

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