I'm old enough to remember a time when baseball on television consisted solely of the NBC Game of the Week on Saturday, selected Dodger road games (including all games in San Francisco), the post-season, and the All-Star Game.  The only time the leagues met competitively was for the World Series.  There was no 24-hour sports station, Baseball Tonight, MLB Network, games on internet.  In a time like that, the All-Star Game was a true event, the stars of the game, many of whom you might rarely see on TV, let alone in person.

But now baseball telecasts exist for nearly every game, highlight shows abound, and you can find at least a clip of a few plays of every game on mlb.com.  The serious fan can get his eyeful of any player in any league at any time.  Add to that interleague play, providing another venue to see matchups between the leagues.  Already this season we've seen Josh Beckett take on the Phillies bats and fail, the Dodgers and Angels face each other, and, not surprisingly, the Mets vs. the Yankees on Fox's national broadcast.  There is no novelty to NL vs. AL anymore.

Despite losing the appeal of rare opportunity, at least I could watch high caliber players in fantasy-league type lineups compete against each other in a spirited but friendly exhibition of the best MLB had to offer.  The fact the game was an exhibition allowed the players to focus on the individual matchups - batter vs. pitcher, battery vs. stolen base king - but also allowed them to drop the game faces in between.  It was an atmosphere where all the players (except for Pete Rose) looked like they were having fun playing the game they played as boys.

In a desperate knee-jerk reaction to an All-Star Game that ended in a tie (so what?), Bud Selig and crew decided that home-field advantage for the World Series should be decided by that season's former interleague exhibition game.  This is simply asinine and makes me angry enough to distract from my enjoyment of the game.  Having something so crucial as World Series home field advantage - made more important by the DH/noDH rule enforced by home team's league rules - decided in a game that is impossible to manage purely to win and has some meaning for only a handful of players whose teams are realistic post-season contenders is simply a ridiculous concept.  The participants in the contest are, at best, minor stakeholders in the prize to be bestowed.  Dumb.

It also seems to me that the rule forcing the All-Stars to include at least one player from every team is contradictory to the goal of making the game count for something.  If there's a meaningful prize at stake, then the leagues should pick the best players irrespective of team affiliation.  No Oakland A's representative this year?  Too bad; the AL has a better chance to win with more Red Sox, Yankees, or whoever on their team.

The fault is probably more mine than baseball's anyway.  These little things add up and just grate against me, providing too much irritation for my curmudgeonly self to ignore and they gnaw away at me all game long.  The All-Star Game just isn't must see TV anymore for me, and I'd just as soon ignore it as watch it these days.  These days I'm now able to follow baseball more closely and intensely than ever before, so the All-Star break might be a welcome respite from baseball mid-summer.

I suppose I should propose some solutions for the All-Star Game, although my suggestions are actually quite simple:

1. Make it an exhibition game, the outcome having no bearing on anything else.
2. Remove the every team has a representative rule; just pick the top studs in each league.
3. Relax the roster limit, why not five more players to choose from? More stars!
4. Fire Bud Selig.

One of the great All-Star moments of all time, in any sport, was Magic Johnson participating in the NBA All-Star game after he was HIV positive and not even on the Lakers active roster.  If Bud Selig was commissioner of the NBA instead of David Stern, that moment would have never happened due to various rules and the fact that it wasn't wholly an exhibition game.