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.