In Football there's the hated pro bowl, in basketball there well the NBA All Star game (aka the Lebron James show) and in hockey there is the All Star game where hitting is all but abolished.
Throughout sports, fans and players have seemed to lose touch with the meaning of an All Star game: group together the best players in the respective leagues and play one heck of a game. Yet while that may be the intention, a culture of 50% effort has been imposed on these games with just one outcast: Baseball.
Yet see, the main reason for the lack of effort in these games has almost always been due to fear injury, and or bad positioning in the season on the part of the superior league, side effect most prominent in football. In these games, players are so afraid of getting hurt that in that annual spell of controversy that is the NFL's Pro Bowl, then rookie defensive stud, JJ Watt once relived a moment in his first pro bowl that really did open the eyes of football fans to how unthinkably pathetic the game actually was.
"I was on the line [of scrimmage] and I had the center right in front of me." Watt said "He snapped the ball and I jumped up to try to push through his block. The second he saw me actually pressing to get to Aaron [Rodgers] he yelled something and stepped aside letting me sac Aaron [Rodgers] as we both got up from the ground, both teams came up to me and said, 'we don't do that in the Pro Bowl'"
We don't do that in the Pro Bowl. Now you see why fans hate footballs filler game for the week between the Conference Championship and the Super Bowl. Yet while the lack of effort will often stem from fear of injury, another key factor separating the Pro Bowl and the NBA and NHL All Star Games, and Baseball's "Midsummer Classic" a meeting that draws the same effort as a regular season game is incentive. In Football there is none, in Basketball there is none, and in hockey there is no extra benefit to winning an All Star Game. Yet in baseball, there is quite a bit of it.
You see the winner of the MLB All Star Game doesn't just get bragging rights and, unlike the culture formed around the NFL NHL and NBA simply making Baseball's All Star Team is not good enough, in baseball you have to win.
Why? Because of this: every year, regardless of any standings, the league (AL or NL) that wins the All Star Game will earn the right to exercise home field advantage in the World Series, a benefit that I cannot stress how helpful it is. Fact is in the past 5 years, only one team whose league lost the All Star Game has won the title come October and as crazy as it it, that one team came 5 year ago in 2008 meaning that for 4 straight years, the league that has won the All Star Game has harbored a team that went on to win it all.
Years when World Seirs winner's league also won All Star Game are bolded
Winner of the All Star game | Winner of the World Series |
NL | San Francisco Giants (NL) |
NL | St Louis Cardinals (NL) |
NL | San Francisco Giants (NL) |
AL | New York Yankees (AL) |
AL | Philadelphia Phillies (NL) |
As much as baseball struggles with the speed of its game, and as much as it weeps as football rapidly grows into the new American pastime, for one day each July, it grabs that crown back from the sport of human refrigerators and mega stadiums and plays an All Star Game the way it is meant to be played.
*Note, 3 Red Sox made the All Star team this year, 2 of them are in the starting lineup: David Ortiz and Clay Buchholz, one more will be on reserve: Dustin Pedroia
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