Why We Might Need MLB's All-Star Game More Now Than Ever

In an era of gambling apps, algorithms and hyper-optimization, baseball’s pointless midsummer exhibition may be the last refuge of what sports used to be.

Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers throws the ball with his son during Gatorade All-Star Workout Day at T-Mobile Park on July 10, 2023 in Seattle, Washington. (Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)

These days, everything in sports has to “matter”. There are consequences, implications, incentives around every decision. Coaching moves get debated like foreign policy; front offices are run like hedge funds. You can, and will, gamble on literally anything.¹ Just as I’m writing this, the Tampa Bay Rays — a team without a real home stadium this year, and one of the league’s worst attendance records before that — were reportedly being sold for $1.7 billion. Big money is always on the line.

Casual stakes and low-stress fun? Forget it. So All-Star Games have mostly succumbed to the fact that they no longer fit their original purpose: the NFL gave up on its version, the NBA’s is totally broken and the NHL’s barely resembles the sport anymore. In trying to reconcile the tension between a meaningless exhibition and the need for everything to mean everything, we seem to have totally lost our taste for the trivial.

And then there’s baseball’s midsummer classic — still frivolous, yet still stubbornly intact.