The Day Major League Baseball Sold its Last Corrupted Morsel of a Soul to a Whore Named Tie

by JCaleb

Baseball is a game as golden as the summer days spent playing it. It is a truly American game which little kids with sticks and tape balls playing every night until their mom's call them in for supper. In the hours from the last school bell to the first hearty helping of meatloaf, they imagine one day becoming the heroes whose cards they collect and whose lives they live in after-dinner dreams of the future. It is life shortened and magnified. A poetry wherein the triumphs and defeats of this sport called life are laid bare before us all.

Or so the story goes.

This of course was the supposed definition of the game at some point in the distant past, long before the years of strikes, including the one that superceded the playing of the World Series, before steroid testing for our 'heroes', before playing professional baseball was so much more than just a good career move.

"So, who won the All-Star Game?" someone naive enough to still have faith in this old definition might ask.

No one. After 11 innings of play, the two teams, representing the best of the best in professional ball and hand-selected by their devoted fans, called the game a tie. Apparently they had run out of players willing to play.

Color me confused.

"The game's just an exhibition, you see, and they didn't want the pitchers to hurt themselves by pitching too long." a friend offered as explanation to help me get past my confusion.

But aren't all professional sports competitions some form of exhibition? I mean, it's not as if these guys are out there curing cancer and keeping them up too late at night might hurt their chances of nailing out the immunity during next week's game. The entire purpose of their jobs is to entertain us.

I'm not entertained.

It comes down to the fact that being paid the paltry sum of money that will only buy you the Mediterranean's smaller islands isn't quite enough for these poor guys to risk injury playing in any more innings than stipulated by their contract. And it certainly isn't enough money for them to feign any nonsensical 'love for the game' that might make them play until they were through.

With this sort of attitude, the players will probably yet again strike before the end of the season, and this travesty of an 'All-Star Game' will remain just one more punch line in the ongoing joke that is Major League Baseball.