When somewhere along the way the All-Star Game went from life-and-death struggle to exhibition and spectacle, with no great import attached to the winning or losing of it, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to "make it count", investing it with the determination of home-field advantage for the World Series.
We haven't got so het up about the All-Star Game in these past years and decades because we don't have any great investment in one league over another. I'm an American League man of longstanding, but I can't think of a good reason for it, and I couldn't think of a good reason to be very upset that the National League had won three All-Star Games in a string before 2013.
The two leagues aren't Republican and Democrat, or even GM and Ford; it's the luck of the draw whether your ballclub happens to belong to one or another, and it wouldn't make any rational sense at this point to attach to one over the other with any great emotion. It's something like being born with a surname starting in "S" as opposed to, say, "A": those of us blessed with surnames starting in "S" might think we've got the finest last initial going, but we'd be worse than silly to invest any great emotion in the S names, or to set ourselves against the A ones, because we've got to know on some level that A or S, it's the luck of the draw.
And there's a practical cause for divesting the All-Star Game of world-ending passion. Big-league ballplayers are something like Winston Churchill's description of modern warships: egg-shells with hammers. One rolled ankle from turning second base in a hurry, and a ballplayer can wind up on the disabled list, watching from the bench and worse than useless to his team. Injuries anymore have gotten to where "stay healthy" has become a sort of "Lord willing" of winning ballclubs, as in, "We ought to make it to the post-season, if we stay healthy."
If an injury is a tragedy to a ballclub, then an injury in a game that counts for nothing is a catastrophe. And if the fans and players and management weren't bothered about injuries from an All-Star Game before 1970, Pete Rose and Ray Fosse had a run-in at homeplate for the ages in the All-Star Game of that year which separated Fosse's shoulder and had some part in truncating his career.
But they say they had to "do something" to "make it count", so here we are, with the outcome of the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series.
Maybe in some other sports a home-field advantage isn't so concrete, but in baseball the home field can and not infrequently does make the difference. Home-field advantage when it comes to the World Series means the first two games and the last two are played in the home ballpark, assuming the series goes to seven games. And since 2003 when home-field advantage for the World Series was first decided by the All-Star Game, the league that's won the All-Star Game has carried the World Series as well, seven times out of ten. Apart from the more psychological element of many tens of thousands of human beings supporting as opposed to spitting on the men on the field, there are at least two very practical advantages to playing at home in the game of baseball.
No two big-league ballparks are alike, for a start: the contours and heights of the walls, the dimensions from homeplate to the outfield walls and from the baselines to the sideline walls, the liveliness or otherwise of a ground ball on the grass and dirt, the way the wind carries along or knocks down a fly ball, the very atmosphere of the place -- vary from one major-league park to another, and sometimes appreciably. An outfielder for instance will be familiar with the way a ball caroms off the outfield walls in his home ballpark, and where those walls are in the first place, and familiar with the prevailing winds and native atmosphere in that park and their effects on an airborne baseball. And so on.
And home-field advantage means hitting last. Hitting in the bottom of the inning makes very little odds except when the game happens to be tied or close in the bottom of the 9th and into extra innings, when a go-ahead run for the home team ends the ballgame and the visiting team has spent its chance to answer that run. That may be said to be psychological like the support or otherwise from the stands: the visiting team gets no fewer at-bats for hitting first, after all, so hitting last is no advantage except in that psychological sense of knowing where you stand, that a run here wins the ballgame, say, or that you've got to register one run before the other fellow registers three outs just to stay alive, etc. But it's a structural psychological advantage, and very real, for the home team and against the visitor. And because the World Series is played between the two best teams in the game, by definition or anyway on paper, you're apt to get some evenly-matched, close-run ballgames between them, and tie-games in the bottom of the 9th and later.
So this is not scrapping over scraps. Baseball is a game of fractions of an inch and of a second, and whole ballgames and even World Series can turn on infinitesimally small things. And home-field advantage for the World Series is no small thing.
The one fair way of deciding home-field advantage would be to compare regular-season records, so that the superior ballclub of the two left standing in late October was rewarded for having been the better team over the course of the season. A coin-toss would be capricious, and the present arrangement of determining home-field advantage by All-Star Game outcome puts the decision into the hands of men who are uninvolved in the World Series, inasmuch as the All Stars are drawn from all 30 major-league clubs.
This scheme for "making it count" that Major League Baseball and the Players Association hit on in '03 is probably the best that could be devised for investing the All-Star Game with anything approaching the import it had in the time of Ted Williams. But I fail to see why the All-Star Game must be so life-and-death, and why it's not perfectly reasonable to regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, as opposed to desperately, earth-shakingly serious.
And anyhow, Major League Baseball ought to make it its policy to let the people decide. If the fans do invest the All-Star Game with some world-ending passion then more power to them, and if they regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, well, so be it. Who can blame them if they do conceive of the All-Star Game more as a spectacle, and what on earth is wrong with it? It ought to be good enough for the All-Star Game to be what the name implies, the one moment in a season when all the very best are assembled on one field and two dream teams. Let the people decide if it counts for anything, and don't let it skew the World Series.
We haven't got so het up about the All-Star Game in these past years and decades because we don't have any great investment in one league over another. I'm an American League man of longstanding, but I can't think of a good reason for it, and I couldn't think of a good reason to be very upset that the National League had won three All-Star Games in a string before 2013.
The two leagues aren't Republican and Democrat, or even GM and Ford; it's the luck of the draw whether your ballclub happens to belong to one or another, and it wouldn't make any rational sense at this point to attach to one over the other with any great emotion. It's something like being born with a surname starting in "S" as opposed to, say, "A": those of us blessed with surnames starting in "S" might think we've got the finest last initial going, but we'd be worse than silly to invest any great emotion in the S names, or to set ourselves against the A ones, because we've got to know on some level that A or S, it's the luck of the draw.
And there's a practical cause for divesting the All-Star Game of world-ending passion. Big-league ballplayers are something like Winston Churchill's description of modern warships: egg-shells with hammers. One rolled ankle from turning second base in a hurry, and a ballplayer can wind up on the disabled list, watching from the bench and worse than useless to his team. Injuries anymore have gotten to where "stay healthy" has become a sort of "Lord willing" of winning ballclubs, as in, "We ought to make it to the post-season, if we stay healthy."
If an injury is a tragedy to a ballclub, then an injury in a game that counts for nothing is a catastrophe. And if the fans and players and management weren't bothered about injuries from an All-Star Game before 1970, Pete Rose and Ray Fosse had a run-in at homeplate for the ages in the All-Star Game of that year which separated Fosse's shoulder and had some part in truncating his career.
But they say they had to "do something" to "make it count", so here we are, with the outcome of the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series.
Maybe in some other sports a home-field advantage isn't so concrete, but in baseball the home field can and not infrequently does make the difference. Home-field advantage when it comes to the World Series means the first two games and the last two are played in the home ballpark, assuming the series goes to seven games. And since 2003 when home-field advantage for the World Series was first decided by the All-Star Game, the league that's won the All-Star Game has carried the World Series as well, seven times out of ten. Apart from the more psychological element of many tens of thousands of human beings supporting as opposed to spitting on the men on the field, there are at least two very practical advantages to playing at home in the game of baseball.
No two big-league ballparks are alike, for a start: the contours and heights of the walls, the dimensions from homeplate to the outfield walls and from the baselines to the sideline walls, the liveliness or otherwise of a ground ball on the grass and dirt, the way the wind carries along or knocks down a fly ball, the very atmosphere of the place -- vary from one major-league park to another, and sometimes appreciably. An outfielder for instance will be familiar with the way a ball caroms off the outfield walls in his home ballpark, and where those walls are in the first place, and familiar with the prevailing winds and native atmosphere in that park and their effects on an airborne baseball. And so on.
And home-field advantage means hitting last. Hitting in the bottom of the inning makes very little odds except when the game happens to be tied or close in the bottom of the 9th and into extra innings, when a go-ahead run for the home team ends the ballgame and the visiting team has spent its chance to answer that run. That may be said to be psychological like the support or otherwise from the stands: the visiting team gets no fewer at-bats for hitting first, after all, so hitting last is no advantage except in that psychological sense of knowing where you stand, that a run here wins the ballgame, say, or that you've got to register one run before the other fellow registers three outs just to stay alive, etc. But it's a structural psychological advantage, and very real, for the home team and against the visitor. And because the World Series is played between the two best teams in the game, by definition or anyway on paper, you're apt to get some evenly-matched, close-run ballgames between them, and tie-games in the bottom of the 9th and later.
So this is not scrapping over scraps. Baseball is a game of fractions of an inch and of a second, and whole ballgames and even World Series can turn on infinitesimally small things. And home-field advantage for the World Series is no small thing.
The one fair way of deciding home-field advantage would be to compare regular-season records, so that the superior ballclub of the two left standing in late October was rewarded for having been the better team over the course of the season. A coin-toss would be capricious, and the present arrangement of determining home-field advantage by All-Star Game outcome puts the decision into the hands of men who are uninvolved in the World Series, inasmuch as the All Stars are drawn from all 30 major-league clubs.
This scheme for "making it count" that Major League Baseball and the Players Association hit on in '03 is probably the best that could be devised for investing the All-Star Game with anything approaching the import it had in the time of Ted Williams. But I fail to see why the All-Star Game must be so life-and-death, and why it's not perfectly reasonable to regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, as opposed to desperately, earth-shakingly serious.
And anyhow, Major League Baseball ought to make it its policy to let the people decide. If the fans do invest the All-Star Game with some world-ending passion then more power to them, and if they regard it as an exhibition and a spectacle, well, so be it. Who can blame them if they do conceive of the All-Star Game more as a spectacle, and what on earth is wrong with it? It ought to be good enough for the All-Star Game to be what the name implies, the one moment in a season when all the very best are assembled on one field and two dream teams. Let the people decide if it counts for anything, and don't let it skew the World Series.
