It’s been awhile, I’m just scratching my itch to write again. Hope everyone survived the MLB All Star Break and the lack of professional sports on your television. If you’re a normal person, you probably did something fulfilling with your life, like a read a book. I have been working on the employment trail (very rewarding, or so I hope). But I also have been thinking about the “All Star” festivities offered by the major professional leagues in the USA.
I am once again reminded why the MLB All Star Game is my favorite exhibition with the “best” cherry picked athletes in its sport.
Typically, you’re not going to get much fluff with the MLB All Star Game. There’s no incentive to fill a non-baseball stadium to overbearing capacity and call it a worldwide event. Yes there is a great corporate presence at all of these events. But somehow, watching the game and fan reactions makes me think there are genuine baseball fans in attendance. Not your typical tools using the event for a photo op.
Location, location, location, baseball like basketball and hockey rotate yearly on where the exhibition will be held. Whereas football tried holding the Pro Bowl a week before the Super Bowl in the same venue and will be going back to Hawaii (for now). You can look forward to a rotating venue year after year which a unique location in baseball.
Now basketball last year, maybe it’s a big ego/Texas/Dallas thing, but overcrowding a football stadium to watch an exhibition basketball game where the majority can’t watch the action without the assistance of a microscope or giant television. It’s not my money to be spent, but where’s the sense in that? 108,713 people apparently don’t share my opinion and bought a ticket to join the crowd, it’s their prerogative.
Why I don’t like that idea you may wonder? It’s not genuine or pure to the game to play in a nontraditional venue. Baseball prides itself on tradition, and justifiably so with its reluctance to instill instant replay to correct obvious human errors. But the MLB All Star Game is a pure baseball game that goes beyond the exhibition feel. Sure, you can argue it doesn’t count in final statistics, and you can say the game COUNTS for World Series home field advantage. What I mean is the quality of the game does not change in the All Star setting. A pitcher faces a batter, the defense shags/fields balls, and everyone is able to play.
It’s fair for anyone to say, you can’t really give it your all in the Pro Bowl, because football is rough. You can break things easier in football. Exhibition hockey isn’t serious; you don’t fight in exhibition hockey. Baseball is a game that allows the player to give a solid effort or none at all (right 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates?).
Plus the timing and lack of other professional sports happening does not hurt the game. The MLB shares the dog days of summer with no one, except maybe the MLS or the WNBA (somehow I miss the Monarchs, how perverse). Yes the ratings reported everywhere will show ratings of the MLB All Star Game were higher than NBA (TNT) or NFL (ESPN), but as I said, nothing else going on and National TV (FOX) help those numbers a lot.
Sure, the game is still exhibitiony, managers try to use every player on the expanded roster, the MLB uses the game as leverage for teams to get new stadiums, and the pregame last Tuesday was a tad more flowery than recent memory (I blame Anaheim being close enough to Hollywood), but compare the game to the other ones in the professional leagues and you should see what I see: A game featuring the best athletes in the sport giving an effort for the entire frame and representing their league with some semblance of pride.
And if you don’t like that explanation of an exhibition game, you can go find a girl and talk about that Deadliest Catch episode and the dreamy Captain Phil.
