Six Extra Innings of Meaning

The whole “make the All-Star Game meaningful” movement started in 2002, when Bud Selig had to call a tied, extra-inning game when the bullpens were too depleted to continue. In an effort to give each pitcher his one or two innings of work, nobody had anticipated the consequences.

Calling the game tied was indubitably a better choice than either breaking baseball’s rules and allowing a pitcher to re-enter the game (which they wouldn’t have done anyway), blowing out some poor guy’s arm by forcing him to stay out on the hill too long, or reverting to that time-honored desperation move of putting a position player on the bump. After all, the game “didn’t mean anything,” right?

Well, we may see the demise of the “meaningful” All-Star game after another extra-inning matchup. In only the sixth annual All-Star Game to determine home-field advantage in the World Series, the game went on far longer than expected, as it dragged into fifteen marathon innings. In the process, Clint Hurdle had Phillies closer Brad Lidge warming up six different times before he finally came in and gave up the game on Michael Young’s sacrifice fly.

The NL used 11 pitchers and the AL 12, meaning that if the game had continued much longer, Selig might still have had to face the tough set of choices outlined above. As it was, the game taxed pitchers like Brandon Webb (who had pitched seven innings and 108 pitches two days before), George Sherrill (the Orioles’ closer, who pitched two and a third innings), and Scott Kazmir (who had also pitched on Sunday, logging six innings and 104 pitches). Webb and Kazmir weren’t supposed to appear at all, with Tampa manager Joe Maddon specifically requesting that Kaz rest his arm, and we have yet to see what the effects might be on them, or guys like Carlos Marmol, who threw an inning in spite of recent struggles and a strong need for rest.

Both Steve Phillips and John Kruk made a lot of hay about this last night on Baseball Tonight, and with good reason. In the new name of All-Star competitiveness, the respective league managers are under pressure to produce a win at practically any cost. Instead of trying to give each player his honorary appearance in the field, or going all-out the way they might on the last day of the season, the managers are left with a wishy-washy compromise. They want to give every guy his turn, but also must try and win the game, while still preserving the pitchers of other teams.

Will it take an even longer affair, with a guy blowing out his elbow on the mound, or the ignominy of position players pitching the rest of the “meaningful” game, as both J.D. Drew and David Wright were allegedly prepared to do on Tuesday? We have yet to see what might happen the rest of this season, and GMs might explode if any of the guys who were overused in this game do down the stretch.

There are several possible fixes to this oddness. One is to pack the rosters even more full—Kruk only half-seriously suggested bringing fifty guys for each team in his BBTN commentary. Then many guys might not get a chance to play, but at least there’s some slack. Certainly there are more deserving offensive and defensive players in the game who might be there on “emergency mop-up duty.”

Another solution might emerge with time. With this game in their minds, future managers might manage the game differently, using their starters for more than just an inning or two, both in the name of winning and managing the game the way they might normally. Forget the dictum of fairness and play this like a real game, pitching a lot with those guys who are rested and rest those who can’t go. Imagine an All-Star pitcher going four or five innings! A position player playing the entire contest! Wouldn’t fans be enraged if their guy warmed the pine the whole game? But that's what happens in a meaningful game.

That leads more directly to my point (and the third solution), which is to eliminate the “competitive” aspect of it. Major League Baseball has taken a game that’s an oddity in many ways—an amalgam of players unused to sharing the same side of the diamond, a manager dealing with an out-of-order pitching rotation and a bullpen not his own—and tried to make it just like a “normal” game.

That’s an impossibility, unless Major League Baseball is willing to extend the All-Star Break to a full week or two, allowing pitchers and players to be well-rested both before and after their appearances, to allow managers to set up a “real” rotation and use their bullpen more freely. Or packing the rosters with a hundred or more players altogether, which really diminishes the meaning of “All-Star” if half the league is in the dugouts.

The All-Star game isn’t a “real” game and affecting its outcome won’t make it so. More things go into the All-Star Game than just winning or losing, and raising the stakes on those wins or losses won’t change those other peripheral concerns.

Abraham Lincoln, that repository of Presidential honesty and wisdom, is supposed to have been asked a riddle (in those days, I suppose Presidents allowed just any yokel into the Oval Office to test his Solomonic wisdom with brainteasers and MENSA puzzles). A man asked Honest Abe, “If you call a donkey’s tail a leg, how many legs does the donkey have?”

Abe reportedly answered, “Four—just calling a tail a ‘leg’ doesn’t make it so.”

Major League Baseball would do well to heed this wisdom. Simply calling the All-Star Game “meaningful” doesn’t automatically make it so. If you want it to truly have meaning, allow managers to do meaningful things on a truly level playing field. And if you can’t do this—by extending the break and expanding the rosters dramatically—then let it go back to the way it used to be, as an honorary game for the players to show off their skills.

Ironically, for all the machinations of the owners, this game was in danger of ending the same way the one in 2002 did, with players on the mound. That’s no travesty in major-league history (it’s already happened this season with the hapless Mariners)—that’s baseball. Run out of players on the bench, and you’ve got to improvise.

As long as last night’s game dragged on, I would have liked to see them drag it on even farther, leaving Selig with the wonderfully ironic choice of calling off the game as he did in the “meaningless” 2002, or risk injury and/or the carnival atmosphere that would have prevailed with Wright and Drew toeing the rubber. Sad to say, but had anybody gotten hurt in this marathon, there would have been no question about returning to the “meaningless” format.

Is that what we have to wait for? A serious injury? It may yet happen this year, as any of the overused arms on either squad could come down with something attributable to the All-Star game. As with so many other things in life, it’s going to take a calamity to get someone’s attention in Major League Baseball. I’m just going to wait for the day when I can say, “I told you so.”