OF COURSE everyone is disappointed with the way baseball commissioner Bud Selig ordered this year’s All-Star game stopped at the end of 11 innings, in order to prevent players from getting overtaxed and risking injury. Yeah, the five 9-year-olds who now make up the audience for this absurd show are just crushed. So are basketball fans, whom the spectacle’s putrid home run derby was designed to attract, and disco enthusiasts, who seem to be the target audience for the pre-game music, including the various national anthems.
I suppose I share their disappointment. A tie is no way to end a baseball game, just as penalty kicks are no way to end World Cup soccer matches. But any disappointment I feel is outweighed by a delight at seeing Selig and the rest of the baseball hierarchy flinch once their capital was on the line. In their unwillingness to risk injury to any of their players, they were forced to ‘fess up that the “Midsummer Classic” is a hypercommercialized, exploitative joke.
Those who worry about doing real damage to some of the best players in baseball aren’t wrong:
First, pitching is dangerous to those who don’t know how to do it, and the Wednesday-morning Bullpen Coaches who suggested rotating position players in to pitch cannot be serious. The beginning of the end for Jose Canseco’s career came several years ago when Kevin Kennedy allowed him to pitch an inning for the Texas Rangers when the team trailed by a dozen or so runs. Canseco, who’d been begging to pitch, destroyed his arm, missed a year, and never again was able to play consistently in the field.
Second, the All-Star game is not worth losing a player over. Period. All of Pedro Martinez’s arm troubles stem from the two spectacular innings he pitched in the 1999 All-Star game, when he struck out 5 of the 6 men he faced–including Barry Larkin, Larry Walker, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire to start the game. Pedro has an excellent, but not Nolan Ryan-esque, fastball, generally 95 or 96 mph. In the All-Star game they were clocking him at 102. This performance was considered the greatest since Carl Hubbell struck out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin in order at the 1934 All-Star game, but I know no Red Sox fan who wouldn’t trade in the feat for a healthy Pedro. I know no Red Sox fan who is upset that Pedro declined the invitation to this year’s All-Star game and decided to rest up in the Dominican Republic. I know no Indians fan who sees any silver lining in catcher Ray Fosse’s career having been destroyed in that home-plate collision with Pete Rose in 1970.
Baseball is admitting that the All-Star game is not important enough to risk its most valuable players on. Good for baseball. If Joe Torre, whose Yankees now lead the Red Sox by two games in the A.L. East, had blown out the arm of Sox’ closer Ugueth Urbina by making him pitch five or six innings, I’d have gone on a hunger strike.
It’s about time baseball’s owners admitted, even if only under duress, that the All Star game is a joke whose only raison d’etre is to stuff their wallets. Now they can do the responsible thing and eliminate it, before moving on to the designated hitter, luxury boxes, puppet-mascots, wide-screen scoreboards, and rock music between innings.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
