July 15, 2009

• Skip This Post……..

  ……..if you aren’t a baseball fan. Or read it anyway. Its going to be all about baseball.

  As you probably know, tonight was the 80th Major League Baseball All Star game. You’ll notice that I didn’t say 80th annual. In fact you will never hear it called the 80th (or whatever number they are on) annual MLB All Star game. This is because for a few years in the 1950s and 1960s, Major League Baseball felt the need to play two all star games each year as a way to raise money for the former player’s fund, as opposed to just paying the players more money. But hell it was the 50s and 60s, players were paid poorly and treated like shit by the owners. Nowadays the players are grossly over paid and there is no need for two all star games, just the need for one game because of the dumbest rule in all of sports.

  Thanks to a stupid panicky move by Commish Bud Selig, home field advantage in baseball’s most important series, the World Series, is determined by the team that wins the All Star game. The All Star game is supposed to be a meaningless exhibition game. At least, that was it was intended to from the first year in 1933 all the way until 2002. That was the year the All Star game came to Selig’s home town of Milwaukee. The teams tied and at the end of 13 innings (or was it 14 innings?) they had no pitchers left and Selig declared the game a tie. After that he wanted to make the game important so he smoked a really fat blunt and came  up with this half baked idea of awarding home field advantage in the World Series to the league that wins the All Star game. Wait, I should correct that. Selig is not nearly cool enough to smoke a blunt. I’m sure he came up with the idea while having his mind altered by trying on pair after pair of new glasses.

  So the All Star game has become the most important game of the year. Players who will not play in the post season help to determine who has home field advantage. And who helps to choose these players? Why, the fans of course. This means that fans can stuff the ballot box (or the websites) with votes for undeserving players in hopes that putting a bad player on one of the teams helps to give their league (and hence their team) home field advantage during the World Series. So instead of teams playing their asses off to get the best record in baseball to get home field advantage, MLB uses a game that has no bearing on the rest of the season as a way to potentially punish the team with the best record in the sport. Basketball and hockey uses the team with the best record to determine home field advantage. And the rest of home field advantage in baseball’s post season is determined by the team with the best record. But baseball fucks this up.

  So what is the solution? Well me and 83% of major league baseball players (according to a Sports Illustrated poll) along with countless fans believe that the home field advantage should go to the team with the best record. The Commish wants the All Star game to mean something. Well there is a way to accomplish both. The team with best record gets home field advantage, but if those teams have identical records, then the tie breaker is the winner of the All Star game. Only I will take it a step further, unlike the Commish, who has no tie breaker in place should the game wind up tied again or rained out. My tie breaker would be the league that had the better interleague record. If by some off chance that is a tie, then the head to head record against common opponents is the tie breaker. If they have had no common opponents or their is a tie in that, then they all have a cocksucking contest and the first team to finish wins.

  As luck has it though, home field advantage in the World Series has not been an issue since 2002, the year before this bulllshit system started. The American League has won every All Star game since then. And no World Series has gone 7 games since then. The National League has won the Series 3 times since then. The AL has won 3 times as well, each time in a sweep, making home field advantage a moot point.

  So what about this year? The game was in St Louis and if I wasn’t a complete idiot, I would have driven the measly 4 1/2 hours and gone to the damn game. The game is always fun though. This year before the game they had a ceremony honoring the “All Stars Among Us”, ordinary everyday people who have done great things in their communities. As the ceremony ended, the players all walked up to the ordinary people and shook hands with them and got their urine samples to be used to cover up the players steroid use. It was a nice touch.

  Next President Obama came out and threw out the first pitch. On his way off the field he handed out another $100 billion dollars in bailout money, this time to the Cubs.

  Once the game started it was a quickly played game filled with commercial after commercial about prostates and boners, just what you want to hear about during a game featuring players who have lost their testicles and shrunk their cocks to steroid use.

  In the end, the American league won again, once again giving them homefield advantage in the World Series. 

  • 12:04 am
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