Major League Baseball

Why it's great that the All-Star Game decides World Series home field

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:14 p.m. ET

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Chris Chase

An exhibition with consequence is a contradiction in terms. By their very nature, exhibitions, like Tuesday night's MLB All-Star Game on FOX, are meaningless, other than as vessels of entertainment. But more than a decade ago, baseball flipped that idea. After the 2002 game was called at the end of 11 innings because both sides were running out of players, a 7-7 tie was declared. Desperate to do something, baseball changed the terms of the game completely. Rather than do the natural thing - end all games after nine innings, hold a tiebreaker to determine the purposeless winner - Bud Selig swung for the fences: The All-Star Game would determine home-field advantage for the World Series.

The idea wasn't a hit then and isn't one now, but why not? What's so bad about giving meaning to the only professional All-Star game worth a damn? Is it a perfect system? No. But, as you'll read, nothing else is either. Here's why the All-Star game should remain the determining factor for home-field advantage in the World Series.

1. The All-Star game isn't what it once was. Give it some meaning.

There's no mystery left in sport. Networks and mediums such as ESPN, FOX Sports, NBC, CBS, ABC, Twitter, Facebook and Pokemon GO (probably, I still don't know what it is - an app hasn't made me feel this old since that time I Googled "what is Snapchat?") ensure that we know as much as we want about the sports and players we love. Gone are the days where there was mystery in seeing Clayton Kershaw pitch to Mike Trout. Interleague play, a great idea that has slowly morphed into an unnecessary contrivance, has killed that. (Free agency does that too, in a different way.) The lines between leagues have been blurred. One person would say that's a reason to never have an exhibition between leagues mean anything. Another would say it's exactly why an exhibition between leagues should mean something.

2. The awarding of home-field advantage in the World Series has never held any significance.

For the first 22 years of the World Series, there was no such thing as home-field advantage. Teams would have three games a piece through Game 6 and then if Game 7 was needed, a coin flip would determine where the game was held. (It wasn't needed that much - there weren't a lot of Game 7s in the first quarter-century of the game.)

After the 1924 World Series, in which the New York Giants lost a coin flip to Washington before Game 6, went on the road for two games and ultimately lost in D.C., there was a call for change. Thus, from 1925 to 2002 baseball deemed home-field so important that it annually alternated the honor between AL and NL cities. (Originally the AL had even years and the NL odd years. But an oddity in 1935 led to the AL getting home field two years in a row and then the years flipping after that.)

That lasted all the way until Selig made the All-Star game the newest arbitrary determinant of where Games 1 and 7 would be played. What's the matter then? A flawed system remains slightly flawed?

The argument against this is easy: Why make it flawed at all? Why not come up with a better system? The problem is that the so-called "better system" is anything but.

3. Using records is no less arbitrary than using the All-Star Game.

Why is it fairer to give a 93-win team from a weak division home field over a 92-win team from the best? It's not. Sports are fundamentally unfair and trying to make them more even usually succeeds in tipping the scales even more. I'll give you this: When an 87-win wild-card team opens the World Series against a juggernaut, then it's sort of a weird method. Here's the thing: That hasn't happened yet.

4. The best teams are still getting home field.

This is merely a quirk of statistics and one that will even out with a bigger sample size. I mention it not as defense for the ASG's involvement in the Series, but merely as a surprising stat: Only twice in the 13 years of the ASG determining home field has the team with the worse record opened the World Series. It's been working anyway! The St. Louis Cardinals were involved both times it didn't, once hosting Game 1 with six more losses than their opponent and once visiting with seven more wins. It's a wash. Again, this is the benefit of only looking at 13 years. But there certainly hasn't been cause for any outrage.

5. Home-field doesn't mean very much.

Why hasn't there been any outrage though? We're outraged about everything these days. It's probably because we know home field isn't that important.

If you thought hockey had the least home-field advantage (as I did), you're wrong. It's baseball. In the wild-card era, home teams win about 54% of all types of baseball games (regular season and playoffs). The NHL is closer to 56%, while the NFL comes in around 57%. The NBA has the most distinct home advantage with 60%. (As discussed in the book Scorecasting, by Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, most of baseball's home advantage comes via the home-plate ump. Home teams strike out less and walk more.)

The time when home field is thought to play the biggest role is Game 7. But in the last 20, dating back to the greatest World Series of them all (1960), the home team is 11-9. (Home teams are on a roll at the moment, road teams had theirs in the late-60s/early-70s.)

6. The rule demands the All-Star Game be treated like a real game.

The biggest problem with this particular exhibition counting is that a manager has two tasks that are as, if not more, important than winning. He's responsible for keeping players healthy (e.g. holding pitchers to infinitesimal pitch counts) and getting players in the game. This isn't the 1941 All-Star Game when Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams played the whole nine innings. These days, a player gets three plate appearances at most, and that happens to just a handful of guys. Four PAs is almost unheard of - only Mike Trout (2015), Jose Reyes (2007) and Carlos Beltran (2006) have gotten that far in the past decade (not including the 15-inning marathon in 2008). As recently as 1998 there were eight players who reached that mark in a single game.

How can you have a game mean something when its routine for your best players to be taken out for token All-Stars from bad teams? This one is indefensible, even to someone in the minority about the game counting for anything. That's why the ASG needs a simple fix: Free substitution. It goes against everything baseball holds holy but who cares? This is a game that once ended in a tie. It's a game that saw 57 players take the field last year. It's not normal so don't treat it that way.

Give every manager the opportunity to put any hitter back in the game once. (This clearly wouldn't work for pitching.) That way, you can take out Bryce Harper in the 4th inning for Odubel Herrera to make everybody happy and then bring him back in the 8th if the game is tight.

7. Make the All-Star Game great(er) again.

Baseball's All-Star game is, and always will be, the pinnacle. But nobody really cared about the result of any All-Star Game up until 2002 because there was no reason to care. You pulled for the league your favorite team was in and that was it. Now that home-field is tied to the result, it's still not a do-or-die game but if you root for a team with playoff hopes, you have a little more incentive to watch to the end or check the result tomorrow morning. Nobody needs to care about the result of any All-Star Game. But things are always a little more fun with something on the line, no matter how small. (Playing a round of golf with your buddies is great. Playing ninesies to see who pays for 19th-hole beers gives it some more punch.)

The point of the All-Star Game is to have fun watching the best players in the game team up and enjoy themselves on a warm summer night, just like the Babe and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Teddy Ballgame used to do. And if there's something to sweeten the pot and it doesn't completely change the course of a season, then why wouldn't you do it?

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