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The bigger players get, the more violent games become and the more we respect — read: pay — the modern athlete, the clearer it becomes that the all-star games in sports are a thing of the past. The NBA realized that a long time ago when they shifted the focus of their All-Star weekend away from the actual game to the three-point shooting and dunk contests. They further confirmed their disregard for the quality of the game this year by continuing the atrocious policy of fan voting that has made Allen Iverson — who has played just 19 games in his worst season as a pro — an All-Star for the 11th straight season.
The NBA seems to get the point of the exhibition is less to recognize players — which can be done officially with postseason awards — than it is to whet the fans’ appetite for drama and excitement. The other professional leagues, however, are somewhere in between the bargaining and denial stages of accepting this consequence of the modern sporting methodology.
MLB and NFL players haven’t cared about their respective All-Star games at any point in the past two decades, yet both league’s executives continue to pull all the wrong strings attempting to revitalize a forgotten ideal.
For many years, baseball’s Midsummer Classic had legitimate rooting interests, but somewhere along the line — likely when its participants realized the event was little more than a curtain call when you’re making $10 million a year — the games started being managed like a charity event.
The uber-politically correct crowd that tells young kids losing doesn’t exist somehow got their voices heard in the mid-’90s when it became status quo to harvest the least sickly looking fruits from baseball’s worst teams. This lovely sentiment, while noble, snubs deserving players on the basis of geography and rewards players who are neither deserving nor beloved. These feel-good, talent-depleted rosters, including unforgettable names like — wait let me Google them, were then thrown into the hands of managers who, putting on their best faces for players who may one day be part of their organization, reordered the lineups each inning with a fervor that can only be truly appreciated by an ADHD sufferer. This is all because apathy and economics had pervaded the game.
In an attempt to expel them and return baseball to the traditionalism that commissioner Bud Selig so covets, in 2003 new policy regarding the game gave the winning league home field advantage in the World Series. So far the policy has injected some life into the game without consequence, but it is a thinly veiled success. In the seven years the rule has been in place, a World Series has never gone to a decisive seventh game. The moment it does — especially if the team with a worse record gets home field advantage — the backlash from players, owners and the media will send this band-aid rule into the trash where it belongs.
The saddest part for baseball is that they had a great thing in the home run derby, but it is run further and further into the ground every year ESPN personality Chris Berman is allowed to incessantly harp “back, back, back, back, back” every time a ball flies out of the yard.
The bottom line is that the All-Star game is a vacation for players, logic the NFL acquiesced to long ago with the Pro Bowl, only to senselessly abandon this year. Seeking to make up for a one-week content gap in the NFL’s 21 weekend-long stranglehold over viewing audiences, business-minded commissioner Roger Goodell has moved the Pro Bowl into the formerly vacant weekend preceding the Super Bowl.
Coming from a man who has already expressed interest in extending the NFL’s brutal regular season to 17 or 18 games to put more money into the coffers of league stakeholders, it is clear Goodell’s asinine decision is a boon to profit rather than competition as it is in baseball. Nevertheless, by moving the game to a time where football, rivalries and grudges are fresh on the minds of players, competition — meaningless competition — is what he is likely to get. And in the NFL, where a player’s best interests have already been superceded by the almighty dollar as proven recently by the league’s deplorable treatment of players with concussions, more competitive brutality is the last thing that is needed.
An All-Star game is meant to be an exhibition. It is meant to be fun. So far the NBA has come closest to realizing that the traditionalist policies of baseball and the gold digging ones of football are just the latest testament to the infiltration of corporate greed into the purity that once was sports.
