Nobody does self-loathing quite like baseball, so it comes as little surprise that its governing body has yet again veered away fearfully yet violently from its essential product, so it can avoid doing more of the thing it purports to celebrate. There is nothing sacred about the All-Star Game, and nothing really to mourn about the fact that a game that was tied after nine innings didn’t proceed to the tenth. But the fact remains that the Most Valuable Player in Tuesday night's exhibition officially went 0-for-2 with a walk during that game, and that the box score does not in any way reflect the only thing about that game that people are discussing today.
Indeed, that very box score reflects the historical, artistic and essentially pastoral nature of the same with these famous and memory-invoking stars:
Pitcher One.
Pitcher One (again).
Batter One.
Batter One (again).
Batter Two.
Batter Three.
What lasting images those famous players must invoke! The Cat In The Hat's people must surely want to sue for seeing this ruthlessly unlawful appropriation of Thing One, Thing Two and Thing Three.
But hey, it's not like you weren't warned before this. This is a league that hates its product so much that it reliably works as hard as possible to avoid performing its very reason for existence. For a league that sends all the signals that it would rather be a real estate development concern, it fits. The end result was as correct a metaphor for the nation as a whole as there could be: Baseball Until We Can Do Something Else.
It wasn't so much that some people found the faux recreation of Henry Aaron's 715th home run better than the actual event, or that Kyle Schwarber won the game with a physical act that ended with the lowest of baseball skills: the genuflection. And none of the broadcasters or participants seemed to know what the tiebreaker rule—the one that decided the game and won Schwarber his MVP—even was. The most enjoyable part of any All-Star Game is trying to figure out what happens when both managers run out of players, and that was gone; when both rosters reached the bottom at the end of nine innings, the game was replaced by a round of high-stakes batting practice in which nobody knew any of the pitchers and four of the five players in the BP-off came from Miami, Seattle, Tampa, and West Sacramento. That is, the league's three least popular teams, plus Seattle's non-Dumper representative. This, it emerged later, was because the players you'd actually want to see in a climactic home run derby had already left the ballpark.
All this unreasonably minimizes the otherwise delightfully maximalist Schwarber, who distinguished himself by hitting three homers in three swings off the Los Angeles Dodgers' best BP pitcher, one of the two Pitcher Ones in the game. Schwarber has hit at least 30 in every full season since 2018, and absolutely is the very embodiment of the refrigerator-sized softball slugger who just swings from the ass on every pitch, because his sole goal is to be the guy who hits five home runs at the Tuesday night co-ed game and then powers down three beers for every bomb at the tavern afterward. He is a very valuable player for the modern game, and should not be denigrated for doing the thing he does best.
But since baseball declared its holy war on extra innings, which began with an overreaction to the blundering end to the 2002 All-Star Game—also tied after nine, but that time ended with Bud Selig's now-famous epitaph, "Screw it, everyone go home"—fans have become comfortable with the idea that the goal of every game should be to get to your car in record time. The notion that every fan is empowered to leave a game whenever they wish and the game can go on without them is now alien to the entire process, and those who would prefer to enjoy all the baseball they can get now have to clear out so that the stadium janitors can start litter-blowing the aisles. This seems like an overreaction to the fact that young folks apparently hate extra innings, but it’s worth remembering that many young people—and, crucially, many owners and the commissioner designated to eat their sins—hate all innings. But hey, nothing stays static forever.
What makes this all the better is that nobody in or out of the ballpark seemed to know what the All-Star Game’s BP tiebreaker mechanisms even were until ESPN's designated rule elf Jeff Passan tweeted them out. It did not occur to anyone that an impromptu home run derby that didn't feature Shohei Ohtani, Cal Raleigh, Aaron Judge, Eugenio Suarez, and nine of the top 11 home run hitters in the sport could seem like a waste of a perfectly good contrivance. It certainly eliminated the happy armchair manager's parlor game, "How To Use Everyone Except A Couple Of Pitchers Just In Case," that has long made scoring the All-Star Game an idler's pleasure. As it was, Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts managed to use 61 of the 62 active players; only Houston reliever Josh Hader didn't get in the game, not even to throw him into the home run derby to increase the degree of difficulty.
We're used to the All-Star Game being a sculpture of poop and kindergarten paste, so hats off to baseball for finding a whole new way to sculpt it. It has floundered to find the perfect solution to the All-Star Game for 23 years now, and as satisfying as the BP nightcap was, the breathless declaration "We Won, 6-6!" still seems not to catch it on the screws. Maybe the next change the league office will promote is keeping all the players in the ballpark for the entire game, including the players they are most interested in putting before the public, so that the game's contrived denouement doesn't have to rest on Kyle Stowers, Brent Rooker, or Jonathan Aranda. After all, an introduction to good players who work for popularly repellent teams isn't how you would ideally close a semi-scripted show, especially when you're giving the impression that you're making up the rules as you go along.
Kyle Schwarber saved a lot of corporate behinds last night, and if there isn't a statue of him on one knee holding a bat and staring into the distance in MLB's front lobby, that oversight will represent one more failure of vision in a business that doesn't seem to like itself very much. At least they'll have Batter Two merch to sell on the website.
