http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside ... 0/insider/
Hm. ANOTHER guy who has come out against the "a player from every team should be there" -- wow, so fresh! What a fucking asshole. I honestly can't remember the last time the Royals were on television. GOD FUCKING FORBID that some Royal fan living outside of Kansas and Missouri want to see a token player of theirs swing it for a little while.
The more miserable comments include:
Right, and the fact that Williams is about ten times the player that Smoltz is right now should be totally and utterly discounted. Smoltz plays on a team with a large payroll! He's on TV nationally! That's far more important than skill, talent or results!!Hey, Mike Williams should be fetching coffee for John Smoltz at the All-Star Game, not enjoying some sense of entitlement to playing time.
No, you stupid fuck, those guys were robbed because the manager that picked the team couldn't imagine life without six of his own guys on the team. And Jesus Christ -- how much fucking worse would it be if there wasn't a restriction that all teams must have a rep? Bernie Williams instead of Randy Winn. Craig Counsel instead of Mike Lowell. Damian Miller instead of Paul Lo Duca. (Oh, wait, that actually happened.) You want Thome there? OK, Ventura's gone. Chavez? Jeter, stay at home. Ordonez? OK, the 4th shortstop that had to make the team so that the fifth-best one (Jeter) could make it stays home. Problem solved. Hell, if you're going to take 5 shortstops you might as well take them all.Get rid of the archaic rule that every team must be represented. People who don't deserve to be All-Stars basically cut the line of guys who do only because of this stupid rule. Magglio Ordonez, Eric Chavez and Jim Thome, for instance, were robbed of spots this year. It's time to ditch the rule, with one exception: the host city must have one representative.
OH NOES!! Fans that haven't seen a decent game in fifteen years almost got a chance to! Why doesn't this fucker come out and say, "... and keep it out of Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Montreal, Florida, Toronto and Philadelphia, too. In fact, it should only be in either New York or Los Angeles."Keep the game out of Milwaukee.
Yeah. Right. There isn't a chance in HELL that Roy Halladay would pitch anything remotely decent to Barry Bonds in a meaningful game until Halladay is at least 30. With a base open, he would be instructed to start walking Bonds before Bonds was fully out of the on-deck circle. This is because Halladay is the only pitcher worth a good goddamn on the Jays and it's not worth utterly shattering his confidence in a game that matters. In the all-star game I, as a Jays fan, got the question of "what would happen" answered, and the answer was "Bonds Goes Yard."Interleague play has helped kill the game because we've seen many of the batter-pitcher matchups before.
Of course, seeing how the Mets and Yankees play each other every year, I'm sure that's enough for him to close the book on their being any other interleague matchups of value. The fact that not all teams play each other every season is meaningless when the "big markets" he apparently is so fucking in love with do.
Seriously, Verducci, shut the fuck up about the fucking hotel rooms. Jesus Christ. That's just embarassing to read over and over again.You keep treating the contest like a glorified spring training exhibition and that's exactly what you wind up with, the major difference being that fans were gouged to the tune of $175 a pop for a competition not played to completion in a city that lacks the ambiance and the hotel rooms of Cactus League towns.
Devil Ray and Brave fan probably enjoyed it. But, right, since it wasn't Giambi versus Perez it was a meaningless at-bat. The game should have been called right then.Did you stay up for that Winn-Mike Remlinger smackdown in the seventh inning?
I really, really have nothing but contempt for these mewling, spoiled little merts who write about a sport that they absolutely don't get in even the slightest way. The only thing that remotely resembled a good take was that the all-star game outcome should decide which league gets the home field advantage in the World Series, but that was hardly new. The game should have been blasted for the fact that they had pitchers hit (because it was a National League park, natch) which is probably the most stubborn and outright retarded thing that baseball has allowed to go on. I don't have a real problem with the DH not being in the National League (due to pitcher accountability, not because there's any more "strategy" because on average there isn't) but for God's sake, in an EXHIBITION GAME it's fucking pointless to make a pitcher bat, or to use up extra players doing the pitch hitting thing.