TWO ALL-STAR GAME CHANGES I WOULD MAKE

ONE IS SIGNIFICANT, ONE IS RADICAL

DID MLB BREAK THE ALL-STAR GAME?

Maybe you don’t care anymore who is on an All-Star team. After all, since we have interleague play, we get to see all the players on one league play all the players in the other league. So what difference does it make who plays in the All-Star Game? But the All-Star Game was one of the crown jewels of the season. Baseball’s ASG was the envy of all the other leagues, whose all-star games long ago became a joke.

Now, the Brewers’ hard-throwing rookie sensation Jacob Misiorowski is an All-Star. He’s an All-Star after having made five starts in the majors. Five. Count the fingers on your hand, and that’s the number of appearances this exciting young pitcher has made in the majors. And in one of them, he allowed five runs in 3.2 IP.

As the Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto said, “That’s just how MLB does it now. Nothing against the Misiorowski kid. But those two (his two pitchers, Cristopher Sánchez and Ranger Suárez) are deserving of being on the team in the first place. There’s no doubt.”

The St. Louis Cardinals' Phil Maton, the Mets’ Kodai Senga were also overlooked.

Ron Darling on Misiorowski earning All-Star selection: ‘Kind of a joke to the game,” and that’s the trouble. If you want to draw eyes, you make sure that Juan Soto is in the game. You make certain that Trea Turner and Seiya Suzuki are there. There are ways to make this work.

This brings me to my two suggestions.

THE BILLY-BALL ALL-STAR PRACTICAL IDEA

It’s easy to suggest that we get rid of the rule that requires every team to have an All-Star representative. I am with Brandon Nimmo. “The process is broken,” Nimmo told the New York Post. “I don’t think every team should get a person. It’s supposed to be All-Stars. It’s not supposed to be, ‘Who is the best player on every team?’ It’s supposed to be ‘Who are the best players in the major leagues?’” I support that with one amendment. The only team that should be guaranteed an All-Star representative is the host team. The local fanbase deserves to see, at a minimum, one of their players introduced and, most likely, one of their own in the game. That immediately clears up a bunch of roster spots for either deserving players or trendy players.

THE BILLY-BALL ALL-STAR RADICAL IDEA

How do you get people not just to watch the All-Star Game, but to stay watching the game?

Here’s how.

Back in the day, when the ASG meant something, players like Stan Musial, Ted Williams, and Willie Mays didn’t just start the game, but played the game. The entire game.

Last season, with the AL up 5-3 with two outs in the 9th, Bryan Reynolds faced Emmanuel Clase as the tying run at the plate. Now, Reynolds is a solid player who had 18 homers at the break last season. But wouldn’t you have loved to see Shohei Ohtani and his 29 homers at bat?

My radical idea is this: Allow any All-Star starter to return to the game once later in the game, if the player is removed by the end of the 5th inning. This would make starting the game more of an honor. It would force these players who often scoot out after they are removed from the game to stay around. You could see the best batters face the best relievers or a relieving pitcher. And, it would add a unique element to the All-Star Game that could not be seen in any other baseball game of any sort. It would enable strategy and excitement, and still enable numerous players to make appearances. It would be confined to starters; replacements and pitchers would not be eligible.

Nick Castellanos repeated something veteran reliever Craig Kimbrel had said in passing, “It’s turning into the Savannah Bananas.” If Kimbrel and Castellanos are right, let’s have some fun in the process.