And...All-Star Game Inanities!

 

Is it just me, or do these Fox All-Star broadcasts just keep getting worse and worse every year?

The underlying problem is that MLB and its oleaginous TV partner took something that wasn't broke—the major-league All-Star Game—and "fixed it"...a manner of operating that has, sorry to say, become something of a national habit.

By going to inter-league play 25 years ago, MLB sapped much of the allure of the world's first all-star game. Ever since, they've been trying to "fix" what they broke, with the ever more annoying "help" of the not-so-good people at Fox.  

In the vain hope of stopping the worst of the inanities, I think you can break the steady slide of these broadcasts down to a series of "enoughs."

—Enough with the virtue signaling. 

Running a tribute to Jackie Robinson, and having everybody wish Rachel Robinson a happy, 100th birthday was charming and altogether appropriate. A nice moment.

(Even if, left unmentioned is the fact that the same jerk who brought the Dodgers out to L.A. also tried to peddle Jackie off to the team's biggest rival for a journeyman pitcher, and broke the hearts of all those fans in Brooklyn who made Robinson's debut such a heartwarming story.)

But enough with the random pandering, such as bringing out Billie Jean King—a perfectly admirable sports figure who has absolutely nothing to do with baseball—to present the game MVP award. 

And enough with the awful "Stand Up to Cancer" moments, in which everyone on and off the field is expected to hold up signs holding the names of deceased loved ones.

Cancer is a disease, not an animate thing. It doesn't care what you think of it. We would be better off "standing up" to Putin, or the dictators who run Saudi Arabia and China...but of course, that might endanger a few Fox contracts.

And stop pushing people to hold up the names of people whose suffering and deaths probably marked some of the worst moments of their lives. 

You want a name on the placard? Hold up the names of elected representatives who voted for whatever silly, venal, or actively harmful expenditure over additional cancer research and care.

—Enough self-promotion. Steve Garvey, second from left, joined Billie Jean for the MVP ceremony, and told us at length about "what a great four days this has been" and how "Arguably, this was the best All-Star Game ever!"

Well, Steve, you can "argue" anything. We could, for instance, argue that that's your real hair color at 74, not something that comes in a box. But it ain't.

Once upon a time, any schoolboy could've named the dozen best All-Star games, even those played long before they were alive...and they wouldn't have included THIS snooze fest.  

But that was before MLB "fixed it."

—Enough with other people's promotions. The boys in the Fox Box refused to interrupt the announcer pictured above when he was promoting his podcast about the late Lyman Bostock—a player cruelly murdered 44 years ago—even though the game was already on, and a player was retired.

The podcast sounds interesting. But there's this game, see...

—Enough with the in-game mics. 

It contributes nothing to the broadcast. The players have nothing to say, it distracts them from the game...and all it does is underscore the message that this is just a meaningless exhibition game that nobody's all that intense about.

The Fox Box boys—looking at you, John Smoltz!—are bad enough as is. They should do a little work on their own, to improve. Stop making other people do it for them.

At one point, they even started pretending that speaking to guys on mic during the game was a good luck portent. Right, and standing up to cancer will stop it. Are we still in the demon-haunted world here?

—Enough with the awful rule changes. 

The Manfred Man is bad enough. Now, to "break a tie" in the All-Star Game, MLB has mandated...a home run contest.

Wow! What a great, original idea! 

What could be better than a home-run contest? The day after...a home run contest?  

Still worse, this led to Smoltz and the other Fox Box cretins telling us, repeatedly, how they were wishing for a tie, because that way they could see...a home-run contest!

I still don't know why extra innings continues to torment MLB. I've always found it a great feature of the game. 

But the writing on the wall is clear. Soon we will be presented with a TV-induced ultimatum, in which even the most important baseball games—even the seventh game of the World Series—will be decided by something as banal and meaningless as a home-run contest, much as soccer degrades itself by deciding its biggest games with penalty-kick shootouts.

Remember...if it ain't broke, hit it with a crowbar until it's in little, bitty pieces.