Bearing in mind their dominance over the past eleven years, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the American League came out on top in the All Star Game last night.\u00c2\u00a0 The result was the only ordinary part of the game though.<\/p>\n
The All Star game is often criticised on the basis of the players not really caring about the result. Well, neither side seemed to want to win last night’s contest, but that wasn’t a sign of ambivalence.\u00c2\u00a0 Chances came and chances went.\u00c2\u00a0 There were great plays (the Nate McLouth-Russell Martin double act being my favourite) and bad plays (hands up Dan Uggla).\u00c2\u00a0 It was a game that had everything.<\/p>\n
‘Mid-season classic’ isn’t always an accurate description of the All Star Game.\u00c2\u00a0 You couldn’t argue with it this time around.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn’t a classic in the terms of the quality of baseball, but the drama more than made up for that.\u00c2\u00a0 Much will be written about the efforts of the players, but the real battlers were the British fans who managed to last the whole fifteen innings.\u00c2\u00a0 Not being ‘hardcore’, I taped the game and therefore had to catch the ending via MLB.com.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s great that Five can now use the Five U.S. channel when a game overruns; so at least those people who were watching live could catch the game in its entirety, from one in the morning to twenty to seven.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Five’s coverage was excellent as usual, despite Dave Lengel’s moustache doing its best to bring the show down (good to see you again though, Dave!).\u00c2\u00a0 It was a shame to hear how obstructive and unhelpful the Yankee Stadium staff were to the team (and other media outlets), but at least it means Jonny can feel less guilty about upsetting Derek Jeter with his ‘evil empire’ question.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Speaking of the captain, the Yankees\/Red Sox rivalry showed no signs of being put on the back burner in the stands (maybe they were shouting ‘Drew’ rather than ‘boo’?\u00c2\u00a0 Okay, maybe not), despite Jeter and Pedroia doing their best to foster good relations between the two teams in the dugouts.\u00c2\u00a0 All we needed was Jason Varitek and A-Rod to share a joke to put the icing on the cake.\u00c2\u00a0 And to put ice on the car windscreens in hell.<\/p>\n
Regardless of the traditional team rivalries, the AL and the NL put on a show and that’s the whole point of the All Star Game.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, inter-league play reduces the novelty a bit, but it’s still a special occasion and that was guaranteed even before the first pitch was thrown.\u00c2\u00a0 If there’s one thing that MLB normally does well, it’s honouring the great players from the history of the sport.\u00c2\u00a0 The pre-game ceremony was done brilliantly and all in all you have to say the 2008 All Star festivities were a success.<\/p>\n
St Louis has a lot to live up to next year, but I’m sure such a great baseball city will be more than willing to rise to the challenge.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bearing in mind their dominance over the past eleven years, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the American League came out on top in the All Star Game last night.\u00c2\u00a0 The result was the only ordinary part of the game though. The All Star game is often criticised on the basis of the players […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[32,553],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-all-star-game","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4623,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions\/4623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}