The MLB publicity machine has been running on full speed for weeks now, promoting the 2007 All-Star Game as a must-see event. Up until last night, I had been fairly ambivalent towards it all.
Making the All-Star game seem special is not an easy task. Pretty much every player is touted as a “star†nowadays and so many games are televised that turning any game into an “event†is difficult. Mike Carlson made a great point about this though on Five’s coverage of the Braves-Padres game last night. Baseball effectively holds a sporting monopoly in America during July, with the NBA and NHL seasons over and the NFL yet to kick off. So the timing of the event allows all eyes in the States to focus on the game. Inter-league play certainly diminishes the novelty factor of players from each league facing each other as we see it plenty of times during the regular season (too often in many people’s eyes). And we cannot escape the fact that the “event†is more important than the game itself.
It is an exhibition match, despite Bud Selig’s attempts to make it “mean something†since 2003 by awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the winning league. Neither the players themselves nor the fans watching at home are any more concerned about the result than they were before. No one at the time of the match knows if it will help their team and I’ve never really seen much evidence of fans of an American or National League team being desperate for their representative to win the World Series. I’m supportive of any attempt to try something different, but this idea has been looked at and I don’t think it works.
And there’s also an argument that it is having a negative knock-on effect. Nineteen of the last twenty-six World Series have been won by the team with home field advantage. If you extend the period back to 1960, the home field advantage disappears somewhat (fifty-five per cent have won instead of seventy-three). You would need to look into this further to decide which figure is more significant (does the period from 1960 show things equalling out over time, or are there other factors since 1980 which have made home field advantage count more since this point?), but either way it seems reasonable to suggest that home field advantage may have an effect. The World Series is the true marquee event, the most important part of the season. How can it be right that the result of a meaningless exhibition game can have an influence on it?
Not that I would advocate the All-Star game itself being scrapped. Far from it. Take the All-Star break away and the MLB calendar would have a completely different feel about it. It may only be a three-day gap, but it serves an important purpose in breaking the marathon 162 game season into two. The relentless, day-after-day drive of the season is brought to a halt, allowing everybody to take a deep breath before carrying on with the second half of the season. Like a mid-way checkpoint on a long expedition, everyone seems to focus on reaching the All-Star break during the first half of the season. You take stock and then brace yourself for the business end of the season.
The All-Star game also offers baseball fans the opportunity to interact with the sport by voting for who they want to be on the teams. Yes, that does make the starting rosters more of a “who are the most popular players on the most popular teams†list, but that’s fine by me. Everyone has the opportunity to cast their votes (twenty-five opportunities this year to be exact) so whoever is chosen by the fans deserves to be there. It’s not a case of right or wrong choices, in the same way that you can argue about who is the best catcher with a group of friends over a pint. Opinions are the lifeblood of any sport; getting people involved and caring about it is the key. The advent of the Internet also allows fans from across the globe to have their say as well, which can only be a good thing in terms of spreading the baseball gospel.
The All-Star game has an extra novelty factor for British fans because the whole All-Star concept is a very American phenomenon. Recognising the drawing-power of assembling all the star players in a single game is typical of the publicity-savvy Yanks. Conversely, I can’t imagine there would be much interest in a Premiership All-Star game. It also fills the hole of acknowledging who the best players are. In British sports, of course, the top personal accolade is to be selected for your national team and being an “International†player is what separates the best from the rest. This concept isn’t really found in North American sports (although some NHL players do to take part in the Winter Olympics) so the All-Star designation serves as a substitute.
What does the All-star game mean to me? Truth be told, I haven’t always watched it over the past few years. The game itself often seems an anti-climax (the mess of 2002 oddly seeming an exception – at least it had some controversy attached to it) and describing it as the “Midsummer classic†is often a bit of a stretch. As a result, I don’t think it’s a particularly effective way to sell the game to an international audience. The passion, drama and intensity of the World Series is much more likely to capture the imagination of newcomers (admittedly the 2006 World Series wasn’t much of a Fall Classic either though). Still, I’m sure there will be a few memorable moments and the event as a whole is well worth having. It’s a celebration of the sport for those who love it already.
The pre-game section on last night’s Sunday Night baseball show on Five has turned around my indifference to the All-Star game this year. I will be setting the video (yes, I’m still in the Dark Ages in this respect) for Five’s coverage as Johnny, Josh and Dave will be reporting live from San Francisco. Johnny’s enthusiasm is infectious enough when holed-up in a London studio in the early hours of the morning, so no doubt he will barely be able to stop grinning from the simple joy of being at AT&T Park. That’s what makes Five’s coverage so great: they make no attempt to hide the fact that, first and foremost, they are fans of the sport. I’m sure they will make the event worth watching, even if the game itself might not be as special as MLB would like us to believe.
