The All Star Blues

Last night I saw this tweet by one of our fellow writers. At first I actually felt offended. I wanted to text Zach and yell at him for being an idiot. We are writers for a baseball blog and have 10+ fans, how could we not all love the All Star game?

It didn't take me more than 20 minutes to realize how right he was. First, there was a rendition of "Beautiful" done by Amber Rilee from the cast of Glee. Who? From Glee? Why? Why is this happening? I couldn't help feeling as if I had done something wrong to deserve this punishment. At least it was better than Train singing at the HR Derby. Bob and I then exchanged this series of texts:

Bob - Oh god damnit
Me - She's not even beautiful
Bob - Probably why they picked her

Second came the new "All Stars Among Us" tribute video. Did you click on the link? Did you happen to notice that the time of the video was almost 10 minutes long? That isn't stretching it. MLB and FOX held viewers captive and forced us all to watch the long, drawn out video talking about all of the people who help out others and were lucky enough to be chosen. Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to take anything away from those people, but lets be honest. We were all there to watch baseball, not to care about day to day activities.

So now with commercials, we have gone past the 7:00pm start time and now sit around 7:34pm. Almost forgot! George Steinbrenner passed away this morning. When I heard the news, I actually stood in shock. So after the moment of silence in which you could very clearly hear drunk fans screaming, it's almost time to start the game.

We still have to do the National Anthem. This perks me up. Maybe MLB will choose a different FOX show and have Gillian Anderson sing. EHHHH WRONG. They trot out Amber Rilee again and have her lull the crowd to sleep. I am restless. Don't even get me started on having to listen to Joe Buck for the next 3 hours. Note: When Zach first posted about the child porn charges for a football announcer, who else would you have thought besides Buck?

Game time. Nice. Finally. Why is it 8pm? The first 4 and 1/2 innings fly. Dominant pitching combined with a horrible glare made this a pitching duel. It wasn't until the bottom of 5 when a superb play by Matt Holliday puts a mark on the scoreboard. I won't go over the rest of the game because we all know how it ended, thank you Phil Hughes for breaking the streak. Still, I couldn't help but feeling some sort of emptiness after watching. There are multiple things missing from making it a great game again and here they are in reverse order:

4 - Mascots. Not only do you have crazy mascots there, but all of them will want to compete for the most attention only leaving room for their best stunts. Not to mention you always have the danger of mascot abuse.
3 - Incentives. Give the players monetary bonuses for hitting a home run or making a diving play. I want players to be pissed that they are taken out of a game. If I was in the All Star game, I would want to play all 9, screw everyone else.
2 - Get rid of Joe Buck. Get a whole new accouncing crew. It would have been awesome last night to hear Ryan Howard, Nick Swisher (because he shouldn't have been playing), and Prince Fielder annouce the game rather than worry about if Buck was wearing pants or not. I can't handle two straight nights of bad announcing.
1 - STEROIDS! We had a pitchers duel last night. There were a few hard hit balls, but none left the stadium. Juice the players up for this game and let the balls fly. As cool as it was to see Wainwright's curve bend 12-6, I would rather have seen 6 home runs. Note: I credit Bob with this idea since he came up with it here.

The only thing that would have made it worse, if this guy would have been apart of the festivities.