All-Star outrage
The game ended in a tie. That's not a problem, but baseball still screwed up. And that pregame show!
By King Kaufman
July 10, 2002 | Tuesday's All-Star Game was one of the best in recent memory while it lasted, a see-saw affair that went into extra innings, with various displays of pitching, fielding and hitting brilliance. But when it was called a 7-7 tie after 11 innings, both teams having run out of pitchers, the fans in Milwaukee booed and cursed, and baseball had screwed it up again.
Now we will have all kinds of debate about how we can avoid this situation in the future. At the postgame press conference, commissioner Bud Selig was already talking about having to expand the All-Star rosters. This is a move that's sure to happen, because almost everybody likes the idea of expanded rosters. Put more guys on the team, and it becomes more likely that my favorite guy will make the team.
Of course, like most of Selig's solutions to baseball's problems, this won't address the problem.
The problem is that All-Star managers want to get all of their players into the game. They'll try to do that if the roster is 30 men or 32 or 35 or 40. With skillful substitutions, it can be done. But if the manager wants to get everyone in the game, he has to get them in before the ninth inning ends, because he can't count on extra innings. So if the game does go into extra frames, he's out of luck.
That's what happened Tuesday. Both Bob Brenly of the National League and Joe Torre of the American League used all their players in the first nine innings except one emergency leftover pitcher, Vicente Padilla of the Phillies for the N.L., Freddy Garcia of the Mariners for the A.L. By the 11th, those two had both gone two innings. It would have been unfair to them and to their teams to ask them to pitch for the duration, when it wasn't their regular day to start and they had prepared themselves to pitch only an inning or two. These guys have regular jobs, you know, in real games, which resume Thursday.
"These organizations and other managers entrust us with their players," Brenly said. "We have to make sure we don't do anything that could hurt them."
But the eminently reasonable calling of the game was a great example of baseball's tin ear when it comes to the fans. The Miller Park announcer told the crowd in the bottom of the 11th that the game would end in a tie if the National League didn't score in that half inning. The fans, who had paid real money to see a real baseball game, which to most people means a game played until a winner is determined, booed.
I think the fans would have been more understanding if the situation had been explained. There's no more pitchers. The game can't go on.
Maybe not. Maybe they'd have booed anyway. But they were chanting "Let them play," which tells me that the feeling in the ballpark was that officials were shutting down the game for some reason, not that the initiative to end the game had come from the field, from the fact that Padilla and Garcia had not volunteered to pitch for as long as necessary, something they had no obligation to do.
So, how do we keep this from happening again? Well, first explain to me why we need to keep it from happening again. The All-Star Game is an exhibition. It's played for fun. Get everybody into the game, and if you run out of players, call it a night. Is it really such a terrible thing for a game that has no real meaning to end in a tie? I don't think so.
All-Star managers trying to get everybody into the game smacks of T-ball to some people, but I like it. With all the stars who beg off from the game at the last minute for personal reasons and late-breaking hangnails, I think it's good to reward the guys who do show up by putting them in.