Quotes of the Day

The rage of the baseball fan is a scream of impotence. He lives and dies with his teams, his favorite sport, and he can do nothing to alter the outcome. For six months, every day can start beautifully, or end in disaster, depending on the score he's just heard. Gets worse: though he may flirt with beauty, he's married to disaster. Anyone whose team (unless it's the Yankees) has 29 chances out of 30 to end the season as a non-champion is pretty much obliged to be a pessimist, a manic-depressive, accent on the depressive. His lows have to be starker than his highs. Or as some baseball sage (Sparky Anderson?) eloquently opined: "Losing hurts more than winning feels good."

I felt pretty good about Tuesday's All-Star Game. My favorite team, the Oakland A's, had two players who acquitted themselves honorably: Miguel Tejada by getting a hit and scoring a run, Barry Zito by efficiently getting an out on three pitches. The game was exciting — considering that it was an exhibition and therefore didn't matter. It had lots of offensive artillery, a fabulous catch (Torii Hunter of Barry Bonds' sonic blast), a couple of late lead changes and, because the score was tied at 7 after nine innings, a tenth and 11th inning. A nice freebie for the fans: midnight baseball.

But then, because both managers had exhausted their allotment of pitchers (nine for the American League's Joe Torre, 10 for the National's Bob Brenly), they and Bud Selig, the Commissioner of Baseball, decided that the game had to end. Some of the fans at Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team Selig used to own, angrily chanted, "Let them play!"

I said, "Let them go home." It meant that the A.L., which had lost all eight of the previous extra-inning All-Star Games, would emerge from this one with a sister-kissing tie. That's no fun in a real game, but in an All-Star exhibition, it's like your sister is J-Lo. From the fan's perspective, what's the point of the Midsummer Classic? Not who won or lost, but how many gifted multimillionaires he gets to see face the best of their peers.

Wrong! I didn't anticipate fan furor at this wanton desecration of the All-Star shrine. Since Tuesday night, the airwaves, newspaper columns and sports websites have collectively shuddered at the horror, the horror of it all. "Tie Score, and Baseball Loses," the New York Times headline mourned in the scolding tone it used to reserve for Al D'Amato. In almost every forum, the sentiment was the same. Play it again, Bud. The fans got screwed again.

Boo hoo. Nobody got to receive the first-ever Ted Williams Award. Well, that post-mortem bauble could have been given anyway, to the best damn hitter of the evening. The award doesn't require a team to have won, anyway, since its namesake never was on a team that won the World Series. (That's what he gets for spending his entire career with the Red Sox.)

Some saw more somber lessons. It's bad enough for us, this 7-7 9/11 ... but what will we tell the children? Honest. One sports-radio host, Kate Delaney of WFAN in New York, had grievance in her voice when she remarked that many ordinary Americans spend lots of money taking their families to All-Star games — and that those parents would now have to explain to their tearful tots that there would be no winner this year. I say that (1) life is like that; (2) this argument comes from the same people who complained that playoff and World Series games end too late for the kids to watch till the last out; and (3) if the little ones are sitting in a ball park at 1 a.m., their parents have some explaining to do themselves.

Baseball pundits and fanciers should be grateful. The calling of the All-Star Game gave them something new to complain about. But I was not grateful. As my own ire at this overreaction soared, I realized I would have to do something distasteful: kind-of defend Bud Selig.

Bud, Brew and Baseball: that trifecta ought to sing, in a drunken choral tenor from the Wrigley Field bleachers. But the baseball lower-archy thinks this Bud's for boooooo! They wish something could make Bud wiser. They'd like to see him in a Bud bier. For many fans, Allan H. Selig is the least popular office-holder this side of Saddam Hussein. And like George W. Bush with the Black Jack from Iraq, fans know they want to get rid of Selig, they announce elaborate plans for his forcible and expeditious removal — but the reprobate just won't go away. On second thought, maybe baseball fans aren't the President of the United States. Maybe they're the Kurds.

Bud is an ass, of course. His mien suggests a fellow both sour and baffled, like an accountant who's not used to the glare of ignominy ... though after nearly a decade in the job, he should be used to pariah status. His former, only slightly less embarrassing status — as the owner of the piss-poor (both pissy AND poor) Brewers, a team now owned by his daughter — clouds whatever partial impartiality the baseball commissioner might be expected to possess.

Selig also has a genius for bad moves with worse timing. The first might have been his own ascendancy to the Commissioner's office at just that moment when the sport needed an overlord with a little charisma. But he keeps trumping. Last November, just after the closest World Series in decades, he declared his intention to fold two teams, Minnesota and Montreal, before this season. That announcement managed to pop the high-flying balloon of baseball exhilaration (for all but fans of the damn Yankees) and get owners, players and spectators back in their accustomed crappy mood. It looks particularly mean and goofy in the light of the Twins' comfy perch in first place in their division and the Expos' in second place in theirs, while the Brewers have the worst record in the National League. Which team should fold?

On the question of the real Bud Selig, I vacillate between knave and fool. But this time he's in a tough place not entirely of his own construction. And the players can't expect much sympathy from fans, even with a gonif like Selig as opposing counsel.

Consider four issues, in steeply ascending order of importance:

1. That All-Star Game. Brenly and Torre, who took some of the heat, were really criticized not for what they did at the end of the 11th inning, but for what they did in the first nine: they let all their players, all 30 on each league team's roster, play. Have I mentioned that the evening is an exhibition? The managers had the radical idea, in this All-Star Game, of exhibiting all their stars. No pitchers were left except the two on the mound, Freddy Garcia and Vicente Padilla, and they'd already gone two innings. To go more than 11 would have guaranteed one of three unsavory possibilities: leaving pitchers in longer than they should, possibly getting hurt; bringing an offensive player in to pitch (never done in a close, real game); and having Garcia groove one to the last batters he faced in hopes they would get a hit and win the game for the other side.

2. Folding two teams. Why not? Major League Baseball had 26 teams only a decade ago, and 28 teams as recently as 1996. If you can add some clubs, why can't you subtract? Especially since the sport has apparently run low on two recent franchise saviors: quillionaires who want to lose some of their largesse just for ego satisfaction, and mid-size cities willing to foot the bill for stadiums the owners won't pay for. In case you hadn't noticed, the economic boom is over. Teams will roll.

3. Steroids. As Sports Illustrated revealed in a special report in the June 3 issue, this is a controversy that splits the players' union. Steroids, illegal in other team sports, are used by perhaps half of all players, including many top sluggers. Selig wants drug testing, while the players' union is likely to defend its members' right to juice up. Fair or not, popular suspicion of drug use could affect the way fans judge all the current big-big-big players, not to mention the game itself. Just as the 1920s was considered the Live Ball Era, because home-run production exploded, so the 90s and 00s may be considered the Anabolic Era, and players known to have gone 'roidal will have asterisks (or tiny testicles) next to their stats.

4. Strike! That's too sickening, and too likely, to contemplate.

So hold this memory precious, sports fans: Once you lavished your misery on a no-win All-Star Game. And recognize that you would have shrugged off the Tuesday Night Follies if it hadn't fit into your larger conspiracy theory — about Bud Selig's clumsy-creepy motives, the avarice of pampered players and the endangered state of a sport that, like a tantalizing girl of our youth, we love-hate too much to see clearly.

• Richard Corliss
• Why the aborting of the All-Star Game wasn't so bad — and why everything else about baseball is worse