All-Star Games = Awful

Now, pretty much each and every All-Star game is pretty bad.  They generally don’t count for anything, so there’s no real reason to want to support either team.  Kind of like a preseason game of the highest paid players in the league.

Even if your favorite team has a bunch of players in the All-Star game, it still doesn’t make it that exciting to watch, I would even argue it makes it less exciting because they’re not playing with all the glue players that make a team a TEAM.

It used to be that the NFL’s Pro Bowl was the worst All-Star game.  It’s after the season is finished, after the media bliz that is the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, so everyone is pretty much sick of football.  I really like football, but after the Super Bowl, I hate football.  Even the die-hard guys who do the 24/7 Fantasy Football can’t stand it.  The players don’t want to really hit each other, because they don’t want to get hurt, and the only allure to the game is getting to go to Hawaii.  It’s a completely worthless, uninteresting game.

However Major League Baseball has taken their uninteresting game, and in an effort to make it interesting, have made it conflicted.  And there is nothing worse than a conflicted game.  First, MLB has decided that in order to make the game more interesting for more fans, they would select at least one member from every team in baseball.  So even if there is another player from another team that is more deserving to go to the All-Star game, they don’t get to go.  This puts pressure on the managers to play every player, so that the fans get to see their All-Star get to swing the bat and play the field.

However, since the side that wins the All-Star game gets home field advantage in the World Series, the managers also feel pressure to win the game.  Anyone who knows anything about sports knows that in baseball, when you are playing to win the game, you don’t play every player on the team.  You play the nine best players that you have on your roster.  So the manager is conflicted between wanting to play every player, and wanting to win the game.

Sure, you can make the argument that they’re all All-Stars so you can play anyone and still have a great player on the field.  But I’m sorry, did anyone else see Dan Uggla on Tuesday?  Point made.

The point is All-Star games are boring and worthless.  But let’s not make them conflicted with contradictions while we’re at it, bokay?  Good talk, see ya’ out there.