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A Midsummer Classic's dream It's time to put meaning back into the All-Star Game
Updated: Saturday February 10, 2001 9:59 AM
This is the slow time of the sports year in which we are reminded how great baseball's All-Star Game is. Though the Midsummer Classic is still five months off, the all-star events staged by the other major sports are forgettable enough to make us long for the hardball version. The NHL (No Hitting, Lads) All-Star Game doesn't even resemble its own sport, thanks to the losing side outscoring the Super Bowl losers. Speaking of the NFL, the Pro Bore ratings were down nearly 50 percent. Among the uninterested were the scores of players who annually beg out of the game with exaggerated injuries. The NBA gets its turn on Sunday. Think about this if you decide to watch the glorified, yuk-and-chuck shootaround: Has there ever been a memorable NBA All-Star Game moment, let alone a memorable NBA All-Star Game? Baseball's showcase is still the best. But there is a huge problem: Interleague play, the diminution of league identity and the rotisserie-style flurry of player movement have put the All-Star Game in danger of becoming just as irrelevant and meaningless as those in other sports. Since 1990, the TV ratings for the game have dropped 45 percent -- from an 18.5 to a 10.1. Barring something dramatic, this year's baseball All-Star Game might draw a worse rating than the opening week of the XFL (9.5). That ought to make the suits on Park Avenue and in Milwaukee sweat right through their tweed. It is time for something dramatic. It is time to put meaning back into the game. Without something at stake, all-star games are nothing more than recess for spoiled rich kids. Here's the solution: The league that wins the All-Star Game gets home-field advantage in the World Series. The current system gives World Series home-field advantage to the leagues on an alternating basis. No merit is involved. (The Yankees, with 87 wins, had home-field advantage last year over the Mets, a wild-card team with 94 wins, simply because it was the American League's turn.) The rule is so ironclad that a wild-card team can never have home-field advantage for the Division Series or the LCS, but it can have home-field advantage for the most important round, the World Series. Figure that one out. In a perfect world the team with the most wins would earn home-field advantage, but with wild cards, wholly disparate schedules and the nightmarish logistics of trying to prepare at the 11th hour for your sport's biggest event, the World Series, this is far from a perfect world. The XFL is, on the whole, much less about sport than marketing, and it is the last undeniable bit of evidence (as if any more were needed) that catering to the lowest common denominator, in terms of taste and intelligence, has been a whopping success. But you would be wrong to dismiss the XFL out of hand. It has come up with some worthwhile ideas. One of them is to replace the archaic pregame coin toss -- it's totally random and has nothing to do with the abilities of either team -- with a flat-out fight for the football between one player from each side (think a ground-level jump ball). Now you've earned the first possession of the game, not been handed it by a paunchy man in a zebra costume flicking coinage. Likewise, home-field advantage in the World Series ought to involve some merit, rather than just the suits blathering about this boy-girl-boy-girl system, "Well, we can't change it because this is the way we've always done it." What is the value of home-field advantage? You can define it this way: The data indicate it's a decided advantage to be the home team, especially for Game 1. Once you get to a Game 7, the logic of the baseball universe no longer applies. Conclusion: Home-field advantage is definitely meaningful. If you are an All-Star, it's something worth fighting for. Once upon a time players wanted to win the All-Star Game because of league pride. League presidents such as Chub Feeney of the NL would give pep talks before the game about how important it was. When the NL ran off a 19-1 streak in All-Star competition starting in 1963, it spawned a whole attitude that became known as National League Superiority. Pete Rose ran over Ray Fosse to win a game. Enough said. As fans, we plugged into that league rivalry and we also got jazzed about seeing batter-pitcher matchups that otherwise never would have happened -- not unless a planetary alignment brought us just the right World Series pairing. You want to see Stan Musial hang in against Whitey Ford in '54? Reggie Jackson hit against Bob Gibson in '72? Harmon Killebrew dig in against Tom Seaver in '78? Jose Canseco vs. Dwight Gooden in '88? You could only get those confrontations in the All-Star Game. Now, because of interleague play and free agency, it's been-there, done-that time at the All-Star Game. Last year you had Randy Johnson and David Wells pitching to batters they had faced before. So now look what we have: no leagues to speak of, really (no league presidents even), and no fantasy matchups to behold. The juice has been extracted. Win one for the league? Hah! Players don't care a whit about that. In fact, players hardly care at all about the game. Ken Griffey Jr. flew home to Florida before last year's All-Star Game because of an injury -- an injury that wasn't bad enough to keep him from taking about 56,000 full-bore hacks in the home-run hitting contest the night before. Frank Thomas jumped on a plane in the middle of one recent All-Star Game, making MLB officials nervous about handing over the game's MVP trophy to a travel agent instead of the first baseman. (He didn't win it.) The trend in recent years is for star players to beg out of the game, claiming to need rest to nurse some minor injury (often known as his golfing jones). If you attach real meaning to the game, players suddenly feel pressure from fans and, more important, their peers to play and to play hard. If the Reds are two games out of first at the break, can Griffey really jet off to play golf if it means a possible home-field advantage for his team in the World Series? Try looking your teammates and fans in the eye after that. OK, I know what you're thinking: If we put meaning back into the All-Star Game, what's to stop Yankees manager Joe Torre from sending Boston's Pedro Martinez out there for nine innings? Rules, partner. You don't allow a manager to do that (although isn't it a hoot to think you have to come up with rules to throttle down the desire to win?). To keep skippers from burning out somebody else's pitcher, you'd have two guidelines: What about the position players? Manager's discretion, as is. Actually, this may prompt managers to keep the stars in the game a little longer -- the stars people actually want to see. Where else would you get Bernie Williams lifted for Matt Lawton in the sixth inning, which happened in the 2000 All-Star Game, as remote controls go click all across America? Only 30 players appeared in the first All-Star Game. Now each team has 30 players, and managers go loony trying to get them all in the game. What about the managers? Traditionally the skippers of the preceding year's league champions are the All-Star Game managers. What happens if you get another 1997-98 Marlins, a team that transformed itself from a world champion to non-contender overnight? Would the manager of such a team deserve to manage with home-field advantage for the World Series on the line? Absolutely, yes. (Anyway, it's rare that a league champion one year would be hopelessly out of the race by July of the next, especially with the wild-card system.) Managing an All-Star Game is a real treat; Buck Showalter still raves about having had the privilege of managing the 1995 AL stars. A manager who gets his team into the World Series has earned that honor. Remember the peer-pressure factor. Do you think, for instance, that if these rules were in place for the 1998 game that Jim Leyland of the Marlins still wouldn't want to win? He'd be getting telegrams from the managers of the first-place clubs telling him to bring home a victory. That's the obvious beauty of playing the All-Star Game with something on the line. It fosters a common cause. It restores league pride. A guy from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a team with no shot at the World Series, might come to bat with the go-ahead run at second base in the eighth inning, with Derek Jeter and Nomar Garciaparra and Jason Giambi and all the other stars from the contenders -- none of whom have rushed to catch a plane -- on the top step of the dugout with a real rooting interest. Who knows, you might even get somebody running over a catcher to score the winning run. The NBA has never had a moment like that. Having World Series home-field advantage on the line at the All-Star Game should be adopted this year. Major league owners would have to agree on this and announce it before the start of the season. Unfortunately, the owners typically move at a glacial pace. Bud Selig appoints a committee to study an issue, the committee meets about one or two times a year and reports back to Bud, who then spends as many years as he needs to build consensus among owners until he can walk to a podium and say, "The vote was unanimous. Quite frankly, I never have seen this kind of unanimity among ownership in all my years in the game." Well, Bud, sometimes you just have to put away your red tape and move when a good idea strikes. The baseball All-Star Game is still the best one out there. Do nothing, and you will not be able to say that for very long. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci covers baseball for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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