This cure is worse than the illness
Oh, so Ron Santo can be blamed for this atrocity.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was on WMVP 1000-AM's "Mike and Mike in the Morning" on Monday talking about tonight's All-Star Game.
A prominent topic was the policy that the league winning the All-Star Game receives homefield advantage in the World Series.
Selig said he was talking a few years back to his good friend Santo, who groused that something had to be done to restore intensity to the All-Star Game.
"You need to change this thing," Selig quoted Santo as saying.
Hardly anybody would argue that. The All-Star Game was stale. Even some players didn't like it, didn't respect it and didn't want to play in it.
Baseball had an elephant with a pimple on it. What Selig did, though, was put an elephant on a pimple.
I'm not sure what that means, other than I hate the idea of the World Series possibly being determined by the All-Star Game.
Take this October, when the White Sox' Octavio Dotel is pitching to the Cubs' Milton Bradley late in the seventh game of the World Series.
(Hey, anything is possible.)
Listen, I don't care whether the Dotel-Bradley matchup occurs in Wrigley Field or Comiskey Park, but I don't want the site to be decided by how a pitcher from Oakland does tonight against a hitter from Florida.
Sorry, but that's like the home field in the All-Star Game being determined by whether a surfer in San Diego eats more sushi than a stripper in Cleveland eats pizza.
The homefield thing is sort of taken for granted by now, like a limp you adapt to. It won't go away until Selig does but that doesn't make it any less dumb in the meantime.
Anyway, baseball created the lack-of-intensity problem and now is trying to solve it with a mistake.
The All-Star Game used to be competitive because players in the AL and NL didn't like each other. They were different leagues with different league presidents and different league offices.
There was no interleague play. There was little interleague trading. There was less interleague fraternizing.
A premier player in the prime of his career played and stayed in one league.
When he went to the All-Star Game, he played to win for his league, his league president and his esteem.
Now instead of two leagues there essentially is one industry. Trades and free agency take players from league to league as seamlessly as I go from double-bogey to triple-bogey.
Heck, a player can even start a season in one league and by July play in the All-Star Game for the other league.
The intensity was drained from the event, which became more of an exhibition than a competition. Actually what it became was an intramural game between fraternity brothers instead of rivals.
So Selig concocted this cockamamie concoction of the All-Star Game winner's representative getting home field in the World Series.
It's frustrating to think that when the Sox and Cubs finally meet for the title this October, the outcome could be influenced by what occurs during tonight's playday in St. Louis.
Mr. Commissioner, sir, this couldn't be what Ron Santo had in mind.
mimrem@dailyherald.com