About Last Night...

First off, let me thank all of you who showed up, huddled around your respective personal computing terminals and liveblogged it up with us throughout the entire four and a half hours of last night's advertising and Fox-swooshing extravaganza, with a little baseball thrown in for good measure. (Meanwhile, Yankee and Red Sox fans are saying: "Four and a half hours? That was a quick one last night!")

Anyways, you're all troopers, and it's fun to hang online with witty and wise baseball fans. We'll do it again soon, and the kegger will be at Archi's.

As for the whole spectacle, which we vigorously defended last week, let us say this: We were kinda wrong. But with an explanation. And here it is.

We have a theory that the 12-month annual cycle for everything is just long enough to allow us as humans to forget about the details, thus keeping our anxieties in check and allowing us to live somewhat happy, temporarily oblivious lives. Looking back, we clearly remember highlights (good or bad), but each year, we have those "oooohhh yeeeaah" moments as things come into sharper focus. Sometimes the realization brings excitement and sometimes, it brings dread. But the year is long enough that we don't recall those feelings or sensations until they are right in front of us.

Oh yeah: That's what winter smells like, and that what it feels like to hear your boots crunching over the snow, and that's what a cold wind feels like in your face.

Oh yeah: That's what this bar looks like when it is overrun by 19 year-olds in during Frosh Week, and that's what their piercing shrieks sound like.

Oh yeah: This is how it feels when I'm halfway through my tax return, and it's not clear if I owe or am owed.

Oh yeah: This is why the All Star Game kinda sucks.

Now, don't get us wrong: We still love the nine innings of baseball that gets played (though we wish that it were managed better and with smaller rosters), and there are elements of the pageantry that we still think are awesome.

But last night, as we watched Joe Buck skip through the lineups as quickly as possible so that Fox could get to an endless taped piece in which celebrities told us how nice and good it is to do things that are nice and good, and as we watched some chick from the drama geek show that we don't watch sing motherfucking "Hero" (because a hero lies in YOU, don'tchaknow), we had that feeling.

Oh yeah: This is why people hate the All-Star Game.

And to be fair to Keith Law, who we pilloried last week for his lack of devotion to the game, sitting in the crowd from the game last night would have been a miserable experience, wrapped around a pretty decent exhibition of baseball. The KLaw quite rightly noted last night that he won the evening by spending it at a ball park as we were spending it, slaving over two screens and looking for meaning amongst the noise.

But the 1983 All Star Game? That was a doozy.

Mad love for the GBOAT
Speaking of things that had faded from memory: We forgot just how much we loved Scott Rolen over the past year. But seeing him last night reminded us of why Rolen is and will always be the Greatest Blue Jay of All Time.

We live in an era of vigorous fist pumps over squibby singles, pose downs over striking out the pitcher for the first batter of an inning, and hour-long specials devoted to how awesomely important a particular athlete is and how impactful his decisions shall be. Rolen, though, seems not to exist in that era. He is an expert craftsman who does his job without lavish exaggeration.

Pick a hot shot out of the dirt at the hot corner and throw a laser across the diamond for an out? Ain't no thing. Jus' business.

Crank a ball back up the middle off the next great young Yankee? All in a day's work.

Go first to third on a soft single, and redefine the entire flow of the key inning in the game? That's just what he do.

Maybe he's taciturn in the clubhouse, and maybe he wasn't a media darling, and maybe he's not one of those athletes who works hard to build his brand and sell himself in all sorts of ways to sell more sport requenching product or whatever the fuck. But Scott Rolen, in the game of baseball, is a man amongst boys.

You know that Old Spice Manly Man whose ads were on dozens of times last night? He goes to bed every night, wishing he was half the man that Scott Rolen is.

The Tao's All-Star Liveblog Extravaganza

Seeing as how we gave Keith Law so much grief for not loving the All Star Game last week, we figured we should make like a swine jumping chops deep into our our muck, and show how committed we are to this dog and pony show.

As such, we'll fire up our first real gadgety liveblog and accompany you through your All Star viewage tonight.

We're not sure that we'll survive four hours of Buck and McCarver, but we're hopeful that you'll come around to help us through it.

The snark shall be unleashed at 7:30 PM in the boxy thing below.

How can you love baseball and hate the All Star Game?

It happens every year, with the gripes and moans and complaints pouring out from talk radio and sports columnists and every other new and old media venue: People bitching about baseball's All Star Game.

Perhaps no one embodies the lunacy of complaining about the MLB All Star Game better than the Fan 590's Bob McCown, who hates the game for so many different reasons that his complaints often contradict one another. The players who should play, he posits, are the same players every year because they are the stars and everyone wants to see Willie Mays. But at the same time, he complains that the fans always get the voting wrong when choosing the starters because they are a bunch of dumbasses who pick players based on reputation. Bobcat also complains about the fact that the game "doesn't mean anything anymore", then whines about the fact that it decides home field advantage.

McCown sucks and blows so hard on this topic simultaneously that it's a wonder that his mic doesn't explode from some sort of feedback loop. He even dragged the increasingly-unreliable Keith Law into the mix last week, getting KLaw to crap all over the game while also adding with pride that he hasn't watched it in years.

Really? Isn't this exactly the sort of know-it-all, affectedly weary, axiomatic thinking that the new generation of baseball analysts were supposed to blow out of the water? Did Law have to start hating the game as soon as he received his BBWAA card?

Really, kids: Why so serious?

The All Star Game is a spectacle. It's one that is too slickly produced, and features too much of Joe Buck's voice, but ultimately, the component parts are still there. The player introductions, where even in your team's worst season, you'll get to see one guy there. The players wearing their respective uniforms, and not some ugly-ass design from Central Marketing. The vote on the starters, and announcement of the bench players, and the naming of the starting pitchers, and all of the ensuing debate.

And jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick: When did we all get so goddamned sanctimonious about who gets named to the team? Why is it that when one guy gets in ahead of someone else, it suddenly becomes a debate about the entire framework around the game and how it's in disarray, and how we need completely new systems to make sure that one guy gets in and one guy doesn't. There are about 60 other players in the game who deserve to be there, and who we'll be pleased to see get into the game at some point. Why can't that be the emphasis? Why can't the debate take on more of a spirit of convivial discussion rather than the childish, stubborn, intractable gainsaying?

(Can we just say: We're looking forward to seeing Cory Hart get into the game. Just because.)

So Omar Infante got into the game. That's a shame, although his making the squad helps to underline the fact that there are still many in baseball who can look at a lucky slap hitter with no power and no speed and say "Hey! .311 batting average! All Star!"

(Is it worth mentioning that Dave Concepcion, the MVP of the ASG in Montreal in 1982, had a first half OPS under .700 that year?)

Whenever people start talking shit about the All Star Game, we start to think back on the 1983 edition in Comiskey Park. That game that featured Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, Al Oliver and Gary Carter in the starting lineup versus Dave Stieb. It featured Mario Soto's brilliantly white shoes, which he couldn't wear normally because of Marge Schott's edict that Reds only wear boring black cleats.

It featured the first grand slam in All Star Game history, with Fred Lynn teeing off on Atlee Hammaker. It featured starters like George Brett, Rod Carew, Dale Murphy and Robin Yount, who would become favorites of ours throughout our early years of baseball fandom. Rickey Henderson subbing in for Carl Yastrzemski. Dan Quisenberry closing the game out with his way-cool submarine delivery. How cool is that?

That one game had a lot to do with your faithful blogger becoming the sort of baseball fan he is. As such, it's more offensive to us to think that people have forgotten that sort of fun than it is to gripe over one first baseman getting snubbed over another.

If you don't like the All-Star Game...

One of our most vivid baseball memories is of Fred Lynn hitting a grand slam off Atlee Hammaker in the 1983 All-Star Game. When we close our eyes, we can still see that ball sailing into the seats in old Comiskey Park, all of these 26 years later.

Which brings us to this: If you don't like the All-Star Game, then I suggest you go find a dark hole into which you can crawl for the next two days and shut the fuck up about it. (This includes you, freeloading mainstream media fatheaded pigboy catering-vacuuming ingrates. Shut it.) It drives us beyond batty every year to hear people - especially those who get paid to watch these games - whine and moan about all of the game's shortcomings.

Seriously, nobody's making anybody watch the game if they don't want to, so feel free to find somewhere else to direct your misery if the notion of an exhibition game of the best players in the game somehow offends your sensibilities.

We don't particularly care if the game doesn't "mean anything", nor do we care that it means too much because of the home field advantage that's bestowed to the winning league. We're not bent out of shape that some guys didn't make the team, and we don't care that the rosters are absurdly big to include all the teams representatives. We don't care that this might not be the best 60-odd players in the Majors battling for supremacy.

The All-Star game is a fun diversion in the middle of a long season. Frankly, we think that people have tried so hard to beat the fun out of baseball that they forget the fact that the game itself is a much-needed diversion.

Go Doc. Go Aaron. Go AL.