I went into the den around the seventh inning, came back with a sandwich, and the National League was winning a baseball game by hitting three home runs in a batting cage. My wife asked who won. I said I genuinely could not tell her. I said it the way you tell somebody a relative has passed.
For those of you who didn’t watch — and based on the ratings, that’s most of you — Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game ended in a tie Tuesday night and was decided by what they’re calling a “swing-off,” which is when three guys from each league stand at the plate and take cuts off a coach and whoever hits the most home runs wins. That’s it. That’s the tiebreaker. They settled the Midsummer Classic with a carnival game.
I called Ray Kowalczyk about this because Ray called me first and I didn’t pick up. When I called back he didn’t even say hello. He said, “Duke, they had a HOME RUN DERBY to break a TIE in the GAME.” I told him I knew. He said, “In the GAME, Duke.” I told him I knew, Ray. He hung up. He called back twelve minutes later to say it again.
Now look. I am aware that the All-Star Game has not been a real baseball game since approximately the Carter administration. I am aware that nobody pitches more than an inning, that half the roster is some guy named Tucker, and that the whole thing is essentially a corporate retreat with batting practice. I made my peace with that. I made my peace with the home jerseys. I made my peace with the fact that the winner used to get home field advantage in the World Series, which was the single dumbest idea this sport has had since the designated hitter, and I am on record about the designated hitter.
But there is a line. And the line is: when nine innings of a baseball game end and the score is tied, you play another inning of the baseball game. You do not roll a giant inflatable die. You do not hold a dunk contest. You do not have Kyle Schwarber take three swings against a guy in a windbreaker to determine who represents the future of the sport on a Tuesday in July.
My old coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to make us run the bases until somebody threw up if a practice ended in a tie scrimmage. He said ties were what happened to people who weren’t willing to find out. He once kept us at the field until 9:40 at night in October because the JV couldn’t break 14-14 in a glorified pickup game. We learned a lot about ourselves that night. Mostly that Petey Corrigan could not, under any circumstances, be trusted to bunt.
You know what would have happened if Sal DiMaggio had been told the All-Star Game ended in a swing-off? He would have asked what a swing-off was. Then he would have been told. Then he would have walked into Lake Erie. Hand to God.
The defense of this thing, which I have now read in three places because I am a masochist, is that the players don’t want to keep playing extra innings in an exhibition game. Fair enough. Players are tired. The All-Star break is short. Nobody wants Paul Skenes throwing his 47th pitch of the night to settle a fake game. I get it. I genuinely get it. The solution to that, in a sport that has been played for a hundred and fifty years, is — and stay with me here — to let the game end in a tie. Print TIE in the box score. Hand out two MVPs. Go home. Eat something. We did it for decades and the republic survived.
Instead we have invented a new event, the swing-off, which exists for approximately four minutes once a year and which my grandson is going to grow up thinking is a normal part of baseball, the way he thinks the runner on second base in extra innings is normal, the way he thinks pitch clocks are normal, the way he thinks a man named “Elly” can be a shortstop. I love the kid. He is lost to me.
The thing that really gets me, and I’ll wrap up here because Denise is coming over with chili, is that the swing-off worked. It was, by all accounts, exciting. People liked it. The crowd cheered. Kyle Schwarber hit three home runs in three swings and was named Most Valuable Player of a game in which he went 0-for-2. He gave a nice speech. His teammates dumped a Gatorade cooler on him. Everyone went home happy.
That is the part that scares me. Not that they did it. That it played. Once a thing plays in this country, it stays. I will be eighty-one years old watching the seventh game of the World Series end in a swing-off and I will, against my will, find it exciting, and that is when I will know I have lost.
Denise is bringing chili. She says she got the recipe from a podcast.