What is the Argument in Favor of the All-Star Game “Counting?”

It has been well over a decade that the outcome of the MLB All-Star Game has determined home field advantage for the World Series.  Babies born in 2003, the first year that the All-Star Game “counted” are almost teenagers.  Those children have lived their whole lives in a world where commercials like this one remind viewers with unbridled intensity that the right to play Game 7 of the World Series at home is at stake.

When those kids watched their first All-Star Games on TV and someone explained to them that home field advantage in the World Series is on the line in a game where none of the participants is assured of playing in the World Series, one assumes they had the same reaction as everyone else:

Well, that doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

It’s amazing and sad when self-evidently ludicrous ideas/practices endure with no end in sight.  The TSA still makes air travelers remove their shoes before boarding, rich business owners still expect public funding for their new sports arenas, and the All-Star Game determines home field advantage for the World Series.  At least the TSA and team owners can make cases for the obviously wrongheaded things they do – those cases would be misleading and ignorant, but arguments could be made.  Is there any argument in favor of the All-Star Game counting?

After doing extensive online research (i.e., approximately five minutes), it appears that no one has ever actually made such a case.  Opposition to the All-Star Game counting is about as close to universal as anything can be in this life.  The best Selig was able to do when he was commissioner was say that the game became more competitive, and that previously players didn’t have much incentive to play in an exhibition game.  An argument about incentives isn’t ridiculous.  Some professional athletes may have All-Star bonuses built into their contracts, although I would guess that’s something only veteran players like K-Rod and Ryan Braun (who obviously aren’t showing up because they expect their team to play in the World Series) can demand.  I doubt Jean Segura was compensated for making the All-Star roster as a second-year player in 2013.  Maybe that’s something the players union can explore in the next round of collective bargaining in 2016.

So there’s surely an argument that players need motivation to play in the All-Star Game beyond prestige and a good story to tell their grandkids, but it’s not clear that World Series home field advantage is the right incentive.  As other pundits have noted, home field in the World Series is a big freaking deal:

From the 2003 World Series onward, there have been 50 World Series games; the home team has won 30 of those, a nice and tidy .600 winning percentage. What’s more, of those 10 series, the team with home-field advantage has won the championship seven times. If you add in the three prior World Series to get a rough idea of the decade, the winning percentage for home teams jumps to .630, or 43 of 68 games. All of the World Series-winning teams from those three years had home-field advantage.

Going further back, the trend still holds. The 1990s featured 48 World Series games, with home teams prevailing in 28 of them, a .575 winning percentage. That decade was even crueler to the road team than the 2000s. Only two of the nine teams that had home-field advantage lost the World Series that decade: Atlanta in 1992 and again in 1999. All told, from 1990 onward, home teams have a .610 winning percentage in the World Series, or 71 out of 116 games.

If the point is to keep players from skipping out on the All-Star Game, World Series home field is too big of a prize.  If the point is to make the game more competitive, there are other less extreme ways to accomplish that.  One is to expand the rosters with more All-Star caliber players, which MLB already has done.  All-Star rosters used to include 32 players for each team, and as of 2010 they have 34.  MLB could always expand rosters further to make sure no one runs out of pitchers.  Of course, that’s no guarantee the game will be more competitive – a review of All-Star Game scores since 2010 doesn’t show anything conclusive about the competitiveness of the game.

Notably, a review of All-Star Game scores before and after World Series home field advantage was added also doesn’t show anything conclusive about the competitiveness of the game.

If World Series home field advantage made the All-Star Game more watchable, that would be something, but it’s not the case – although ratings did get a nice bump last year when Derek Jeter made his final appearance.

When the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a tie after both managers had used all their pitchers, it was a massive embarrassment for MLB and then-commissioner Bud Selig, as well as the city of Milwaukee that played host to the whole sordid affair.  Selig needed to make sure that something like that didn’t happen again.  But considering the original driver was simply to ensure that the All-Star Game didn’t end in a tie, it seems apparent that putting World Series home field advantage on the line was a disproportionate response.  If there’s a strong argument otherwise, for some reason no one is making it.

(Image: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)