Home Run Derby Shines Brighter Than All-Star Game
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by user LastRow
The Major League Baseball All-Star break is the official low point of the sports year. If you want to watch sports today, you've got the Home Run Derby and ...What? Well, that’s if that all important Arena Football playoff game between the Chicago Rush and the Los Angeles Avengers doesn’t get the testosterone moving like a 200-plus pound broad who’s sitting next to you when the bartender yells "Last Call"! Every All-Star break allows a chance to schmooze with fellow superstars…It’s certainly a nice way of creating revenue for a specific club, which this go around the Giants are the benefactors of ... But it is not the hotly contested, hang-on-every-pitch experience Bud Selig and/or Fox would want you to think it is by dubbing the All-Star Game "This One Counts" after Selig got cake on his face in his hometown of Milwaukee in 2002 after blundering the game to a draw.
Let’s not be fooled here MLB, the players don't care about home field advantage in the World Series…Sure, both sides want to win the mid-summer classic, but it’s nothing that any competitor wouldn’t want to do. Incidentally, has it really made that big of a difference…Not really! Does such a thing even exist in baseball? Okay, so players get to sleep in the comfort of home rather than the Ritz-Carton, but that’s where it ends. All it is, is or was…A PR stunt gone bad. To try to caption viewers attention again and to have sit in front of the boob tube with a catchy slogan. Um, well has that been working? Again, not really. Bud, all your employees might be able to pull the wool over your eyes in the whole steroids fiasco, but when it comes to watching the All-Star festivities, all the mumble jumble that comes out of your cake hole is fallen on deaf ears. Baseball is not what it once was in the country…Nor will it ever be again! The game doesn’t hold that much meaning to us anymore regardless if "home-field" is at stake. To me, the game doesn’t even measure up to CSI: Miami reruns, for the simple fact that they have Emily Proctor on their team! You think she digs the long ball?
On the other hand we hand the new and improved State Farm Home Run Derby. I was disappointed not to see that BALCO didn’t attach their name to this contest! It would’ve been the perfect match! So when Albert Pujols agreed in principle yesterday to participate in this year's Derby he was the seventh person to do so this year. He is competing against Matt Holiday replacing the late scratch of Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Ryan Howard, Vladimir Guerrero, Magglio Ordonez, and Justin Morneau. Unlike the game, I thoroughly enjoy watching chem-laced players swing their cork swizzled sticks while hitting a ball wound so tight in fact that it resembles how our pants fit after Thanksgiving dinner no matter who’s invited. Watching them become flying projectiles into the summer night as we sit back in amazement and enjoy the show…Don’t be alarmed NASA, it’s not an asteroid appearing on radar! The Derby is America's chance to sit back, mute Chris Berman so we don’t have to cave our flat-panel LCD in the first time he says "He hit that one to Oakland…Followed up by Santa Cruz and Palo Ato," and "Back, Back, Back, Gone" and watch a feat of athleticism, (if that’s what one wants to call hand-eye cordination) that never, ever gets old!
The derby never gets old watching for the simple fact of the unknown. We never know how far the balls are going to fly out of the ballpark, who knows what they’re going to clip on the landing? And this year with McCovey’s Cove…Who knows how far out in the water they’re going to splashdown? I’m sure Berman’s going to somehow mention the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz too! Unlike with the NBA with the Slam Dunk and Three-Point contest, there’s only so many ways one can dunk a basketball…Only so many times one can watch three-pointers being made before everything gets repetitive. True, a homerun is just that, a homerun…But the Home Run Derby allows truly for the show…To be in awe. Whether these players are laced with the Cream & the Clear, resembling your grandmother’s pin cushion with so many holes in them, doesn’t matter how big one’s head has grown over the years, or stepping into the batters box with a corked Louisville Slugger, tonight, none of which seem to matter…Gee, and Barry Bonds passed on this open invitation. For this two-day stretch it’s just about putting on a show for the fans and everyone realizes what they're dealing with when players throw their caps on backwards and head to the plate….Nothing seems to matter! The only thing that does is to have a grand old time…And sorry to say Bud, but in the first week of July, nobody is thinking about the World Series and no one believes the silly lie that the game matters in any sort of way!
It’s crystal clear to see that a simple Home Run competition which first came to the boob tube in black & white with the likes of Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Harmon Killebrew, Mickey Mantle, Ken Boyer, Jim Lemon, Jackie Jensen and Rocky Colavito back in 1959 has captured the spotlight away from the game that made all these names All-Stars! And isn’t ironic when the actual game itself is supposed to mean the most it can’t even measure up to a 500-foot tator in some glorified batting practice contest….Question is, how it stack up against Rock, Paper, Scissors?
