The Dallas Mavericks earned home court for the Finals with a better regular-season record than Miami, so the Mavs got the first two and last two at home.īaseball's excuse? It would be a logistical nightmare to reserve enough hotel space to cover all the possible World Series schedules if best record dictated where it started. Wait: The commissioner remains so desperate to induce the players to take this game seriously that he rewards home-field advantage in the World Series to the winning league? Absolute lunacy.Įver stopped to wonder why baseball doesn't reward World Series home field the right and only way - by regular-season record? That's the way the NBA does it. It's still as American as kids lighting and throwing little sticks of gun powder. Nobody ever really stops to think about what this game has become. It's what they dangle when trying to get a city to fund a new stadium. It's roughly their equivalent of the Super Bowl. Pierzynski - onto the team instead of baseball's hottest pitcher, Francisco Liriano.īut, of course, baseball's owners would sooner eliminate home runs than phase out the All-Star Game. Seriously, how credible is an All-Star game when you let fans vote for the starters and the final man on each team? Right, it does my heart good to know the White Sox conducted a "Punch A.J." PR campaign so their fans would vote everybody's favorite wrestling-style villain - A. And in each city, fans could take just as much pride - maybe more - in knowing their All-Stars were selected by peers for an entire season. We could still spend the days leading up to and the days following the announcement debating who should and shouldn't make it. I wouldn't mind seeing All-Stars announced the final week of the season - and I would dearly love to see them picked by players and managers only. All-Star teams are often littered with first-half wonders. We pick All-Stars from just the first half of the season? Would the teams look the same after the stretch runs? No. In some ways, the All-Star Game is nearly as strange. At what point does America wake up and ask: How and why did this "great" tradition ever start? To celebrate winning a war against the British for our freedom, we encourage our children to set off small bombs and launch little rockets in the backyard? It's like encouraging kids to shoot handheld fireworks on the Fourth. Now, I'm not sure I'd really miss the All-Star Game if it finally outlived itself and became extinct. When Buster Olney proposed on that players should declare before the season whether or not they want to play in the All-Star game, so they can be scratched from the ballot, Harold Reynolds responded on "Baseball Tonight" that, given that choice, 80 percent of players wouldn't play. Shouldn't Red Sox fans be glad that Manny Ramirez is exaggerating a knee injury so he doesn't have to find his way to Pittsburgh and back? Manny played 19 innings on Sunday before the Red Sox finally lost to the White Sox.
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No, a pitcher doesn't want to get lit up and embarrassed on national TV any more than a hitter wants to get fooled and flail at three straight pitches. You always hear that the All-Star Game is "for the fans." But do Detroit Tigers fans really want their ace, Kenny Rogers, to have to warm up and pitch two pressurized innings Tuesday night?ĭon't tell me players don't care how they perform once they're out there. But wouldn't the fans of their teams be better served if these stars could rest physically and mentally for a mere three days at midseason? Yes, they make incomprehensible amounts of money to do so. They perform for us nearly every day for six straight months. So I find myself sympathizing with the many veteran stars who don't want to spend a much-needed three-day break in July flying to and from the All-Star city and slugging their guts out in the Home Run Derby on Monday night and playing in the game on Tuesday night. I realized how much I want my 162-game season and my best-of-19-game October to be the highest quality possible. Some Tigers fans probably aren't too thrilled that Kenny Rogers has to pitch in the All-Star Game.