Tonight, about the time I’ll be posting this article, the National League will host the American League for the 2015 All-Star game. There’ll be the usual pre-game pomp: a horde of analysts predicting which team has the better lineup or rotation, followed by the lengthy introduction of players: managers and coaches, reserves, and then the starters.
I used to love about the All-Star game. That’s understating it a bit: for most of my childhood the All-Star game was the one can’t-miss sporting event of the summer. I cared about it: I filled out ballots, collecting them at the ballpark and filling them in carefully, after consulting the league leaders. I followed the tallies that the newspaper posted on vote getters. I’d get mad about the snubs.
I’ve stopped caring. I don’t think I’ve watched an entire All-Star game in at least a decade. The last All-Star game I have any memory of was the 1999 contest in Fenway.
Why did I stop caring?
I used to think that I stopped caring because I grew up. The All-Star game is kind of cheesy. There’s an awkward balance between solemnity and jocularity that is kind of awkward, and a lot of the tension within the game seems uncomfortable (is the manager going to let hometown Twin Glen Perkins close the game, or on-his-retirement-tour Mariano Rivera finish it?), or silly (which pitchers are being saved if the game goes into extra innings?). I don’t like fake sports, and the All-Star game seems like the ultimate ‘fake sport’. It was fun when I was a kid, but I’ve got kids of my own now.
Thinking about it more recently, it dawned on me that my ambivalence about the All-Star game has less to do with the falseness of the contest, and more to do with how superfluous it is.
The All-Star Game, for most of its existence, served two useful purposes:
- It showed us a concentrated dose of the best players in the sport, and
- It showed us interesting matchups that we otherwise wouldn’t see.
When I started watching All-Star games in the late 1980’s, this was awesome. That’s the term we used, ‘awesome.’ We were pretty rad back then.
I mentioned how much the player introductions annoy me now, but when I was a kid this was actually a highlight: we got to see what Ryne Sandberg or Eric Davis looked like in real time. This was fun. This was something we didn’t have back when cell phones weighed fifteen pounds and emitted enough radiation to sterilize any small mammals that came within a 100-foot radius of the phones.
We don’t need this anymore. Now, in this age of instant access to information, we don’t need this. If I want to watch Bryce Harper eat his morning bowl of oatmeal and crushed rhino horn, I can just Google it and watch the video on my I-phone.
Likewise, while the All-Star game used to offer exclusive matchups (Gooden versus Boggs, Clemens versus Schmidt, Dan Petry versus Von Hayes), now we get these interleague matchups in the regular season.
And they matter in those regular season matchups. Why should I care what Mike Trout does against Clayton Kershaw during an exhibition game, when I get to watch Mike Trout face off against Clayton Kershaw in a real game, one that counts in the standings?
The All-Star Game hasn’t lost its luster because the average baseball fan is older and more cynical. The All-Star Game has lost its shine because the things that used to be exclusive to the game now exist in other realms, and in better formats.
There is no longer anything essential about the game.
* * *
So here’s my proposal. Here’s my idea about how to fix the All-Star Game.
Partially, my idea is built on the back of this year’s Home Run Derby, which overhauled its structure to make the annual contest one thousand times more interesting than the "Chris-Berman-Says-the-Word-‘Back’-Until-My-Ears-Bleed-Derby." That is: I’m suggesting a big overhaul of the current structure, not a small tweaking of the current version. Let’s blow this sucker up.
Before we get to the structure, I’m going to address, first, the point of the game.
One of the biggest issues that people have with the All-Star game is that it decides home-field advantage for the World Series. I don’t really know why this riles people up, but it does.
Instead of doing away with this component to the game, my approach would be to double-down on it. The All-Star game would still decide home-field for the World Series. And it would decide home-field advantage for every round of the playoffs.
Let’s get to the structure.
We’d still have two teams, an AL team and an NL team. They’d still be managed by the manager who made it to the previous season’s World Series.
But each team would have three sub-teams: an East, Central, and West team.
Each of these sub-team would be responsible for three innings in the game. The managers would choose which sub-team took the first three innings, which sub-team took the three middle innings, and which sub-team managed the last three innings.
Let’s talk about roster construction, because we'd have to change that, too.
We’ll have three rounds of selections: a fan-vote round, a player’s-vote round, and then a manager’s round.
Instead of having fans vote by position, fans would vote by team….whichever player on each team gets the most fan votes is on the All-Star squad. Each team gets one player: the Royals and Red Sox each get one fan representative.
The players would vote the same way: one player from each team. Each team would have a Player Representative.
Then we’d get to the manager’s choices. The manager would also have to pick one player from each team in the league. That’s forty-five All-Stars, if you’re keeping count. Three per team.
The manager’s choices would be difficult, because he’d have to ‘fill’ the rosters that the fans and players left him with. If the fans and players haven’t selected a catcher or a shortstop for the AL West team, the AL manager has to use two of his slots to fill that position on the diamond. He's also limited by having to pick one player from each team. If you want Brock Holt because of his position flexibility, you can't also have Koji to close the game.
In all likelihood, the managers would have a fifteen-player roster, with ten or eleven position players, and four or five pitchers.
Once the fans and players had their votes, and the manager filled out the roster, we’d get into the game.
At some predetermined point, the AL and NL managers would have to announce the order that they were playing their sub-teams. The AL manager would have to say: "We’re playing the Western squad, and then the Eastern Squad, and finishing with the Central squad." The NL manager would make his own announcement.
This gives the managers a chance to strategize before the game. The AL Central’s team would probably have a deep bullpen: Holland and Robertson would be strong candidates to make the team, as would Wade Davis. The NL Manager might anticipate that the AL manager would go play the Central team last, and organize his team to counter it.
We could have this result:
Innings 1-3 – NL Central versus AL East
Innings 4-6 – NL West versus AL West
Innings 7-9 – NL East versus AL Central
We’ll get to extra innings in a second….sticking with the game itself, we’d have three smaller games within the larger game. These games would decide home-field advantage in each of the playoff rounds. Let’s see how this would break down.
Innings 1-3: NL Central 2, AL East 0
Innings 4-6: NL West 1, AL West 0
Innings 7-9: NL East 3, AL Central 7
Final score: NL 6, AL 7
The American League has won the ‘big’ game: they have home-field advantage in the World Series.
But the Division teams have scored points of their own, which will decide home-field in the earlier rounds.
The NL Central scored two runs, and allowed zero runs. Their score is +2.
The scores of the Division teams are as follows:
AL East: -2 (In their sub-game they scored zero runs, and allowed two).
AL Central: +4
AL West: -1
NL East: -4
NL Central: +2
NL West: +1
How does this play out in the postseason?
The AL Central team has home-field advantage in all of their matchups. If they reach the World Series they’d have home-field there, too, because the AL won the game.
Whichever team wins the NL West (the Dodgers) would have home-field if they played the NL East in the playoffs, but they wouldn’t have home-field if they matched up against the Central representative.
What about the Wild Card teams?
This gives us the home-field for the Wild Card game: if the AL Wild Card teams come from the East and West, the West team hosts the game. I think the Wild Card team should carry their ‘score’ into the Division and Championship Series matchup: it would be possible for a Wild Card team to have home-field advantage in the Division or Championship series.
There’d be ties, of course. If there was a tie, we could use something to break the tie: most HR’s, say, and then most strikeouts, and then most hits.
What’s compelling about these games-within-the-game is that we’d have players who ordinarily work against one another enlisted to work with one another. Instead of having the Royals and Tigers and Indians battling against one another, we’d have them playing for a common goal, one that could benefit all of them. It’s be unique. It’d be fun to see Chris Sale and Jose Abreu cheering for Yordano Ventura.
And…the players are simultaneously competing with and against the other players in their league. They benefit if their divisional compatriots win their sub-games, but they don’t want them to win their sub-game by too much, or they’d lose an edge in the earlier playoff rounds.
The other benefit is that we’d take away the annoying ‘cycling of players’ that takes place in the current game. Nine of the ten (or eleven) position players would play the entire three innings. The pitchers would each go one inning, or less than that, which is what happens anyway.
Let’s say that we have a tie game after nine innings. What happens then?
The game would reset. The division sub-games would be over, and the teams would be playing for home field in the World Series.
For the extra-time period, we’d do something like the shootout: each manager would pick their dream team, from anyone on their roster. And they’d pick three pitchers….whomever they wanted.
In the extra-time period, everyone would bat: each side would have exactly nine hitters swing the bat, trying to push across as many runs as possible in their nine at-bats. The manager could change pitchers whenever he wanted: he could let Pitcher #1 pitch to one batter and then bring on Pitcher #2 to three batters, and then ask Pitcher #3 to finish out the game.
Whichever team scores the most runs gets the home-field advantage. If it’s a tie, we’d use the same tie-breaker we use in the divisional games: number of HR’s, then strikeouts, then hits.
As I see it, this gives the game a distinct structure that makes it different than ordinary games. I think the foundational problem of the All-Star Game is that it’s exactly like regular games, except the purpose isn’t really to win. As much as the managers say they want to win, the real purpose is to let as many people play on the field as possible. Right now, the All-Star Game is a juggling act pretending to be a real game.
What I’d propose is to make the game into four real games: three inter-divisional games that, added up, tally to one big game.
Whaddya think?
Dave Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.