Thursday, July 14, 2011

My Solution to the Problem That is Baseball's All-Star Game



I know baseball doesn't want to admit it and I certainly understand why, but man is it boring. Now don't get me wrong, I love the sport, but in today's world it just seems to drag on forever. With technology keeping everyone in touch with everyone and everything else all the time, we feel like there shouldn't be anything known as “free time”. Hell, whenever a commercial comes on a video online I roll my eyes and pop open a new tab on Chrome and come back to the video once the ad is finished. Thirty seconds is to much for my attention span to handle without being occupied. And with baseball, you've got nothing but free time.

It wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem if there weren't so many games in the regular season. I'm a St. Louis Cardinals fan and have been ever since I was in diapers. But if I watch more then 10 games from start to finish this year, I'll be surprised. Usually, I'm checking on my phone and if it's a close game in the 7th inning or so I'll flip over and watch the last little bit. Of course there are a lot of fans out there that are much more devoted to their favorite baseball team, but there are a lot more fans like me. They wouldn't call them die-hards if everyone could do it.

So if you're trying to rope in those casual fans like myself for the All-Star game, how are you going to go about doing that? They're latest idea is making it matter by having the winner of the game getting home field advantage in the World Series. I'd be ok with that if they didn't have fan voting for the starters because did anyone from the AL really want Derek Jeter and the year he is having to be a deciding factor on whether or not they got home field advantage? And if it is such an important game, why force managers to make sure that every team is represented? Not to mention the fact that after players backed out either because they pitched two days before, they were injured, or just didn't feel like participating, the total number of All-Stars this year was 84.

But here I am complaining about it without offering up a solution. Baseball is about numbers and tradition more then anything, so what not try and build the festivities around that? Find a way to get Jeter invested in coming to the game and make a big deal about his 3,000th hit. He's the first ever Yankee to get to that number and even people who don't really like the Yankees like myself are ready to admit that it's really cool he got all 3000 with the same team so why not have the Yankee heroes of old show up to congratulate him for the 7th inning stretch? That way to see it live you have to at least be flipping back and forth instead of just watching the pre-game stuff.

And with as many players and numbers as baseball has to work with, they can certainly find at least one thing to celebrate every year. They could even have a break between the 2nd, 4th, and 7th innings to different players, teams, or milestones. I'm not saying that would solve the problem, but it's a suggestion worth thinking over if nothing else. It isn't as if anyone is paying attention anyway.

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