Starting 9: Improving the MLB All-Star break

The American League won a very tight MLB All-Star game Tuesday night. This followed a tremendously exciting Home Run Derby and Futures Game. This is exactly what the league wants for exposure for the game, but it’s getting little press outside baseball circles that normally would give coverage. How can it be fixed?

Look way before MLB All-Star week

MLB All-Star week certainly has its stuff to deal with, and we’ll explore those things coming up, but before we even touch the game itself, we need to look at how the rosters are formulated.

MLB changed All-Star voting this season with fan voting to get to the top 3, then voting from those 3 to get to the starters. I personally think this is a step in the wrong direction. One of the disconnects in All-Star voting has been the push each team does to promote its own players over the best player at each position. As someone on multiple teams’ mailing lists, I received no less than 40 emails just in the month of June from teams to encourage me to vote for that team’s players.

Fans are obviously going to be beholden to their favorite team, but the All-Star game should be about two things – the best-performing players and the biggest stars of the game having a chance to showcase the game. There’s no reason the right fielder for a popular team who is hitting .246/.317/.396 with 7 home runs should be the starting outfielder over players with 20+ home runs or those who are among the most popular players in the game.

While this is not a perfect solution, having fans vote in players to the team, but then those players having no set role, would be the best way, in my view, to get a better balance of both responding to the will of fans and also ensuring the best product for the game.

Clear the All-Star decks

One of the biggest reasons top players have had recently for backing out of the game is the desire to get a few days off in the midst of a busy season without hurting their team. By the time we get to July, players are typically over halfway through their season, meaning their bodies have been subject to over 80 games of wear and tear, so to say that they need a break is perfectly reasonable.

Currently, teams play on Sunday and pick up again on Thursday for one game before going full schedule on Friday. Essentially, there is one series removed from a typical week of play for players. Instead, why not let players take a full week off to rest, relax, and allow the game to showcase the sport for a week with some of the suggestions we’ll get into?

Put the entire week on standard TV

Yes, I know that Major League Baseball wants to promote the flagship MLB Network, and there are current agreements with networks that could make this difficult to do immediately, but in part with giving the week off, MLB needs to truly acknowledge and utilize the advantage that a July All-Star game provides for the league. The NFL doesn’t start preseason games for another month, the NBA is a long way away. The biggest challenge is every few years when the World Cup or the Summer Olympics happen to possibly run near the same time, but in general, MLB has the sports-viewing public monopolized at the time of the All-Star game. They need to make better use of it.

Putting portions of the week on MLB Network or ESPN does still isolate viewers, even if the amount of viewers that have been isolated has been drastically reduced in the era of phone apps and cord-cutting. You wouldn’t see the NFL put the Super Bowl on a station that automatically shuts out a significant amount of potential viewers, so why do it with the All-Star game?

ESPN could have the events, but they could simply rebroadcast on ABC. MLB Network could give a second broadcast of the Home Run Derby or other events with perhaps a more analytical take on the event, but in general, getting more eyes to see the faces of the game is going to help with the popularity and societal recognition of the game.

Really enhance the Futures Game

One tremendous thing that the league did this year is to put primarily young players into the Home Run Derby during All-Star week. Highlighting the young stars of the game is a great way to get fans engaged in players that will be around for years to come. However, the league already has a great tool in place to do exactly that.

The MLB All-Star Futures Game is now 20 years old, and some of the best players in the game over the last 20 years have really received their first exposure in the Futures Game. For many of the players, their first experience playing in a major league stadium is the Futures Game.

The league has finally stopped playing MLB games at the exact same time as the Futures Game, but there are still plenty of baseball distractions on the day. Would the league ever schedule the celebrity softball game ahead of the MLB All-Star game? Not happening…

By expanding to a full week off as mentioned before, the Futures Game and prospects can be the focus of an entire day of the MLB All-Star break. On that day, you could have a Futures Game Home Run Derby, media day, and then the game with a focus on those young players for a full day, giving fans a chance to see and become fans of the up and coming future stars of the game.

Incorporate the World Baseball Classic

The World Baseball Classic has become a much better event as MLB has invested into it, but the concerns still remain about how to both get more viewership for the WBC and also how to assuage injury worries that teams have for players who go deep into the WBC.

The primary reason that teams did not want to allow their players to participate in the 2017 WBC was injury risk. While the event still was a significant success and very enjoyable, it would be even more so if the best of the best played in the event.

One thought that has been tossed around is essentially a two-phase tourney that would essentially eliminate the MLB All-Star game once every four years. The WBC would play an initial phase of games in March that got the contenders down to a final 4. Then during the MLB All-Star week in July, the semi-finals and finals would take place as the focus of the week rather than the All-Star game.

Yes, it’d mean that we’d need to consider things other than raw All-Star selections when considering the Hall of Fame, as a player could time his peak wrong and miss out on 2-3 All-Star selections due to the games being eliminated by the WBC during his career. Of course, worrying about All-Star selections in Hall of Fame consideration is a folly of its own course, but that’s a whole other article.

Give us the “old school” Home Run Derby

This will likely rile some readers up due to the tremendous Home Run Derby that we saw this last year, and that was incredible. The current derby format has been molded and crafted well to generate interest in the game.

What would be fun is to take the event every few years back to its roots, the old Home Run Derby show that once was played, featuring stars such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Mickey Mantle, and more. The format was simple – one man faced off against another for 9 innings with 3 outs per inning. The winner was the one who hit the most home runs around his 27 outs.

The format was enhanced by between-inning interviews with the participants, giving an often-rare glimpse into the personality of some of the game’s stars. I particularly enjoy the banter between teammates Aaron and Mathews that took place in their matchups. That allowed fans to see a side of Aaron in particular that the media at the time rarely was able to see.

That focus on the participants would allow for viewers to really get to know the stars of the game better, something that has lagged behind recently for baseball.

Let it be an exhibition

While the score of the game is important, and the players definitely want to win, tying the game to anything meaningful is really not okay, and having teams dictate how their player can be used also takes away from the play of the game.

I loved watching Alex Rodriguez move Cal Ripken, Jr. over to shortstop in Cal’s final MLB All-Star game. Having moments like these really requires bending traditional rules of the game, and that’s what an exhibition really should be allowed to do. As long as both managers are aware ahead of time or agree at the moment, having a particular player bat out of order or a pitcher re-enter the game is not a bad thing.

A great example in this year’s game was John Means. Means was an 11th round draft pick by the Orioles out of the University of West Virginia in 2014. He struggled through his time in the minor leagues, never really being a prospect, though he always showed excellent command and control.

He won a rotation job with the Orioles this spring, and he’s put up an impressive season for the hapless O’s, going 7-4 over 18 appearances and 82 2/3 innings, with a 2.50 ERA and 1.08 WHIP. He rightfully earned an All-Star nod, but he was placed in the back of the bullpen for the American League. Worry about the potential of a tie meant that Means sat in the bullpen, never getting into the game in what could be his only MLB All-Star appearance. The intention is to showcase the players of the game, which should mean that each team should see their representative get into the game at some point. If that means agreeing to a provision to allow a pitcher that has already thrown to re-enter the game, then so be it, but the game shouldn’t be so beholden to avoiding a potential tie that an entire fan base is left without seeing a representative in the game.

Add in a skills competition

I’ve thought about this for years, and I’m still not sure which events I’d like to see brought in, but that’s why there are great people out there to do the research to find out among fans (and players) what skill events would draw both viewers and participants. Regardless, one thing that the NBA All-Star experience has over MLB’s is the ability to showcase individual players through skill competitions.

The MLB All-Star week has the Home Run Derby, but imagine a “defensive highlight” competition among infielders, a home run-robbing competition, a precision pitching competition, or one of my favorites, a precision hitting competition. In fact, the MLB All-Star game wouldn’t have to work hard to see a great example of the latter as the Arizona Fall League has utilized an excellent hitting skill competition with multiple targets placed throughout the infield and outfield that players receive points for hitting.

While a “hardest throw” competition would almost certainly be immediately turned down by both players and teams alike, you could also add in an accuracy competition for outfield throws.

Culminating the “skills” day in the Home Run Derby would be a great use of one day of MLB All-Star week.

Incentivize participation at the league level

One of the things that is most frustrating for fans is to see multiple players duck out of the MLB All-Star game due to phantom minor injuries. When fans vote in players, and they choose not to attend, it puts an even deeper divide between fans and players than already exists, and that’s exactly what the league wants to avoid in marketing the game.

While teams can incentivize All-Star selections in contracts, a team, quite frankly, would likely be okay with their player not stressing themselves out in the game and potentially suffering an injury. Instead, like the increased pot for the Home Run Derby, Major League Baseball could incentivize players by providing players who appear in the game a bonus from the league (and then encourage managers to use all available players). While that still may not incentivize some players to participate, turning down free money is not something the vast majority of players are going to do!

So what do you think? Are any of these completely out of whack? Do you have other ideas to improve the MLB All-Star experience? Feel free to comment below!