The Midsummer Classic has lost its edge

AMERICA AT LARGE:THE MAJOR League All-Star game was still a few years off when, in his early days as a campaigning politician, Abraham Lincoln cited the example of the condemned prisoner who said of his impending execution, "If it wasn't for the honor of it, I'd just as soon skip the whole thing".

Tuesday night’s game in Anaheim, California, will be the 82nd edition of the annual Midsummer Classic that dates to 1933, and the first thing the astute reader might notice is that the numbers don’t add up. For a few years, from 1959 through 1962, two All-Star games were played, rendering the institution the semi-annual Midsummer Classic. In that rare instance, logic eventually overtook sheer greed in the minds of the baseball lords.

Before the advent of interleague play, the All-Star game served as the fans’ only chance to see players from one league in action against the other, and in bygone times the participants actually seemed to care who won.

In 1950, Boston’s Ted Williams crashed into the outfield wall at Chicago’s Comiskey Park making a spectacular catch, broke his arm, and missed over 60 regular-season games. Twenty years later, Cincinnati’s Pete Rose scored the winning run by bowling over Oakland catcher Ray Fosse in a collision that sent the latter to hospital with concussion.

Contrast that to, say, the 2002 All-Star game, which was declared a tie by mutual consent of the managers because both had run out of pitchers after 11 innings. That will happen when you start changing pitchers every inning.

Commissioner Bud Selig apparently found the ’02 turn of events so disconcerting he declared that henceforth home-field advantage in the World Series would accrue to the team representing whichever league won the All-Star game.

The intent, obviously, was to restore competitive spirit, which seemed to be on the wane. In practice, the American League All-Stars have won every game since.

Which is not to say the players no longer look forward to the three-day break occasioned by the Midsummer Classic. They just don’t look forward to it the way the fans do. From the players’ perspective, it’s a chance to get together with their families, go off on a golfing or fishing holiday, or, in some cases, collect a big appearance fee for showing up at some memorabilia convention – pursuits, in other words, which could be disrupted should the player be inconveniently selected to actually participate in the All-Star game.

Thus, the rosters of both squads have already seen a massive attrition, both in players begging out of the game with injuries real and imagined and in managers flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of the regulations governing participation, effectively rendering pitchers unavailable, for instance, by scheduling them to pitch on Sunday, the last scheduled games before the All-Star break.

When Selig issued new guidelines specifying that pitchers who started Sunday would be ineligible for Tuesday (though they would still be considered All-Stars) he was presumably attempting to add a layer of integrity to the Midsummer Classic, but the rule has had the opposite effect.

Up until 1957, selection of the starting line-ups for the All-Star game was determined solely by a vote of the fans. That was the year the Cincinnati newspapers engaged in a ballot box-stuffing campaign that resulted in the election of seven Reds players to the eight available positions – or would have, had then-commissioner Ford Frick’s office not intervened and overruled the suspect plebescite.

In more than a half-century since, the teams’ make-up has been determined by a combination of fan and player voting, with the respective managers allotted considerable leeway in filling out their squads.

And “squad” may no longer be the appropriate term. Contemporary All-Star rosters might better be described as a company, maybe even a battalion. Following the 2002 debacle, Selig took steps to avoid a repetition by expanding the rosters to comprise 34 on each team.

This proved a boon for the extra players, to say nothing of player agents, most of whom now routinely negotiate contracts providing for a hefty bonus for being named to the All-Star team.

Baseball rules prohibit incentive clauses rewarding statistical and numerical plateaus, on the grounds that it might lead to late-season hanky-panky. If Joe Blow were, say, in line to collect an extra million for hitting 50 home runs and had 49 going into the last week of the season, it wouldn’t look good if the manager decided to keep him out of the line-up for the last six games.

Back in the days when it was the goal of every player to be recognised by both the fans and his peers by participating in the All-Star game, then, a contract bonus for making the All-Star team seemed a sensible alternative.

But in 2010 you’d have to say that the goal of most players seems to be to be named to the All-Star team without having to show up for it. Of six Boston players named to the American League squad, for instance, only half will be in uniform on Tuesday night.

At least the Red Sox made it look good, putting Dustin Pedroia, Victor Martinez and Clay Buchholz on the disabled list.

Yankees closer Mariano Rivera was named to the All-Star team, withdrew, citing injury, even though he remained on the New York team’s active roster going into the weekend and had worked in four of the Yankees’ last five games going into last night.

And since the AL team is managed by the Yankees’ Joe Girardi, his decision to use hulking lefthander CC Sabathia in Seattle on Sunday has also attracted some scrutiny. Sabathia would collect on the All-Star incentive, even though he would, in keeping with Selig’s guidelines, have to be replaced by another player of the manager’s choosing.

Girardi added to this skullduggery when he decided to nominate California’s Jared Weaver as Sabathia’s replacement, even though Weaver is also scheduled to pitch, against the A’s, on Sunday.

So by the time Girardi names a pitcher to take Weaver’s place, he will have effectively ensured three separate contract bonuses for a single roster spot. A California newspaper suggested this week that by the time this little game of musical chairs has run its course, as many as 100 players may collect All-Star bonuses in connection with the 2010 game.

So much for preserving the “integrity” of the game.