That gust of wind that startled you awake last night at 10:37 p.m. (1:37 a.m. for you poor East Coasters)? That was a giant sigh of relief from American League All-Star manager Terry Francona and MLB commissioner Bud Selig.
Francona and Selig had a real predicament on their hands during Tuesday’s All-Star Game with an empty bullpen and a 3-3 tie in the 15th inning.
Luckily for both parties, Michael Young’s sacrifice fly in the 15th won it 4-3 for the American League, which improved to 6-0 since the game started deciding who gets homefield advantage in the World Series.
Had the AL Stars failed to score, both Francona and Selig would have had a tough decision on their hands. Boston’s skipper was down to his last pitcher, Rays starter Scott Kazmir, who had just thrown 100-plus pitches on Sunday.
And Selig was having flashbacks of the 2002 game, which ended in a 7-7 tie when the two teams ran out of arms.
In 2003, Selig started the “This time it counts” campaign, and the American League’s next five victories led to homefield advantage in five straight World Series.
While homefield advantage hasn’t be a huge deal in the Series the past five years (there hasn’t been a Game 7 since 2002 when the Angels beat the Giants), it’s only a matter of time before it is a decisive factor – and to have that advantage determined by a July exhibition between dozens of players who won’t even make the playoffs is ludicrous.
That’s why I was secretly rooting for a tie on Tuesday, so that Selig would have to come up with another crazy way to settle the score. (How about playing over the line? A game of pickle? Anyone up for some pepper? WiffleBall?)
Or he could let the players determine it during the season and have the team with the best record take homefield advantage in the playoff meetings – just like every other major sport out there.
But it doesn’t sound like Bud is going to budge on this any time soon.
“I didn’t do it for the TV ratings,” Selig told Newsday recently. “I did it to restore the intensity of the game. Before we did this, I had guys like Ron Santo and Hank Aaron coming up to me and saying, ‘The All-Star Game meant so much to us.’ They wanted me to do something.”
Well, I wanted to go to sleep tonight at a decent hour without having to watch Dan Uggly boot three groundballs, strike out three times, and then write a blog about how lame the “this time it counts” rule is.
But I guess we can’t always get what we want, can we Bud?
You guessed it Dodgers fans, Nomar Garciaparra accomplished the feat in 2000.
And get this L.A. fans … in that same game, Andruw Jones went 1 for 2 with an RBI – that’s only nine less RBIs than he has in 53 games for the Blue Crew in 2008. Well, it’s good to see Nomar is still the same player he was eight years ago.
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