With our typical gift for mindless overreaction (well, not mine; by any standard I'm a hell of a guy), we have decided that once again, the All-Star Game is broken. This time, there weren't enough pitchers to cover two games in one night.
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| Huh? You want to fix my All-Star Game? Good luck! (Getty Images) |
Now we don't want to have Bud Selig's back here -- for one thing, he would snap around and go into spinal seizures wondering why we're there. But this current furtive hand-wringing over Tuesday's All-Star Game, which will end no later than Friday night given our usual attention span, reminds us mostly that we are never happy, we are never satisfied, we always want the unforeseeable to have been foreseen by the people who lead our sports -- people we constantly suggest are either nimrods, dullards, hyenas, knaves or all the above.
In other words, how many 15-inning All-Star Games do you think you're likely to see?
So if we have to fix baseball's All-Star Game, we have to by damn fix them all. Fortunately, we're here so you don't have to be. First:
Baseball
Clearly 64 players (well, 63; Tim Lincecum was under some sort of weather and didn't make it to Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night) aren't enough, despite the fact that 64 are too many. And 15 innings is too many, even though the final eight innings were the coolest eight innings in recent All-Star history. So we'll give you a choice.
A: Expand the roster to 53 per team so as to fall in line with current NFL standards, and hope the game doesn't go 26 innings, or:
B: Make it an exhibition, with kegs behind every base, hitters forced to hit from the opposite side, pitchers forced to throw while sitting on barstools and managers forced to use lineup cards made by Etch-A-Sketch. The slogan: "This Time, It's For Snicks And Giggles Because The Whiny Media Can't Make Up Its Mind What It Wants."
And if neither of those are good enough for you, go out to dinner.
Football
This is the worst of the all-star games because so many players look for ways not to actually participate and because it comes after the biggest game of the year. But we're here to fix even the unrepairable, so we'll give you two choices again.
A: Play the game in Buffalo in absolutely crap weather the week before the Super Bowl, and pay every player $250,000 to attend, and fine them $250,000 if they don't.
