Baseball used to be America’s pastime, and the MLB All-Star Game was the center-piece of that pastime.  This was a game in which the best players would showcase their talents in what truly was the only REAL competitive all star game amongst the 4 major sports.  But my first question is who even watched it?  I know I didn’t

According to several reports, including those from Fox Sports and Ad Age, this was the lowest rated all star game EVER.  Only 8.7 million people even bothered to tune in.  The fact of the matter is that the game is boring.  Many of your prime time athletes are deciding to play either basketball or football.  And the reason for a lot of this is because baseball is almost non-existent in the inner-cities of the United States.  This is where the majority of your high profile and best athletes come from, and they simply want no parts of it.

We can attribute a lot of this decline to the strike that took place during the 1994 season.  Ever since then baseball has been on a downward spiral.  With no baseball to watch, fans turned their attentions to other sports.  And baseball has never recovered.

They tried to add some excitement to the game by putting home field advantage during the playoffs up for grabs during the game.  But that didn’t make much sense because the game was already competitive.  Home field advantage should actually be decided by the individual teams making a post season run, not by a collection of the best players from each league.

Will they ever get it right?  Who knows, and at this point who cares.  By the way, in case you missed it, the American League won the game 4-2.