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.
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.
