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July 9, 2002: MLB All-Star Mockery

One year later follow up - Thomas Boswell

Due to incompetence and gutlessness, the 2002 Major League Baseball All-Star game was ended as a tie. What follows is reaction from the BMTG and a variety of sources around the nation...

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Bud Selig hoped Barry Bonds, Torii Hunter and the other All-Stars could help baseball forget its troubles for at least one day.

Bewildered fans file out of the first All-Star Game to end in a tie since 1961, a game that was called due to rain.

Wrong!

In Bud's backyard, even the sport's summer showcase ended with fans booing. Despite Bonds homering and Hunter making a spectacular catch, the All-Star game finished in a 7-7 tie after 11 innings Tuesday night when both teams ran out of pitchers.

Selig, who lives in Milwaukee and ran the Brewers before becoming commissioner, made the ultimate decision to call the game after conferring with both managers.

The sellout crowd of 41,871 at Miller Park loudly chanted "Let them play!'' and "Refund!'' A few fans in right field threw bottles to protest the controversial decision.

"I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the fans,'' Selig said. "Given the health of the players, I had no choice.

"The decision was made because there were no players left, no pitchers left,'' he said. "This is not the ending I had hoped for. I was in a no-win situation.''

Amid worries about a players' strike and steroids looming over the sport, baseball had hoped to put the focus back on the field. Instead, the abrupt halt may just have been the first work stoppage this season.

"This is terrible. These guys are going on strike and they're doing this now?'' said Tim Dugan of Chicago. "We've been ripped off.''

There was no MVP picked. Bad timing, too, since the award was renamed this week to honor Ted Williams, the Hall of Famer who died Friday.

This was the second tie in All-Star history. The other one came in 1961 and was stopped by rain.

An entertaining evening that began with Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Cal Ripken taking part in festivities to remember the game's past wound up with fans even more angry and upset about its present and future.

"With everything going on in baseball, I'm sure the fans were very upset,'' Hunter said.

Freddy Garcia struck out Benito Santiago with a runner on second base to end it, and players walked off to jeers. While players said they understood the decision, fans did not.

"They treated it like it was a meaningless game,'' said David Cuscuna of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "They're telling the fans this game doesn't matter. Not to mention the $175 face value for tickets. It sends a lot of bad messages.''

Said Selig: "This is a very regrettable situation.''

It became apparent that a tie was possible after the top of the 11th when AL manager Joe Torre, NL manager Bob Brenly and umpire crew chief Gerry Davis went over to talk with Selig in the front row next to the first-base dugout.

At one point during the five-minute discussion, Selig threw up his arms.

After Luis Castillo flied out to start the bottom of the 11th, the stadium public-address announcer informed the crowd of the bad news, saying a tie would be declared if the NL didn't score in the bottom half.

Garcia and Vicente Padilla, who finished for the NL, each pitched two innings. All 60 players on the two rosters were used, prompting Selig to raise the possibility of increasing future rosters.

The result left intact the AL's five-game winning streak. The NL leads the overall series 40-31 -- and now with two ties.

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Thomas Boswell, Washington Post:
There should be a sign here outside Miller Park that reads: "Game called on account of incompetence and indifference."

Perhaps, fairly soon, a sign with those words will be hung outside every park in baseball. And who knows for how long.

The incompetence belongs to Commissioner Bud Selig. As a problem loomed, he didn't have a clue it was arriving. Given a series of options, he chose the worst. This is the man who canceled the '94 World Series. This is the guy who, two days after the best World Series ever played, said baseball needed to kill two teams and "maybe as many as six."

By his standards, calling off a mere All-Star Game, even if it is tied 7-7 in the 11th inning and the stands are still packed, is all in a day's work. Even if it did enrage his hometown crowd into chants of "Let them play!" and, after the game ended, "Bud must go!"

The indifference belongs to the American and National League players -- shame on them, every one -- who didn't care enough about their sport or the paying fans in the stands ($125 a ticket) or the millions watching on TV, to find a way to finish an All-Star Game. Whatever happened to, "We wanna play."

Instead, they took the low road -- a tradition ingrained in them by an arrogant, above-the-game union -- and walked off the field to a cascade of richly deserved boos. As the AL-ers left, two actually bumped fists as if celebrating. Around midnight, some fans, still irate, gathered to chant, "Go on strike now!"

Not so many years ago, such a humiliating, callow and unprofessional conclusion to an All-Star Game -- the contest used to be called the Midsummer Classic, now it's the Midnight Vlassic -- would've been unthinkable. If you were the last pitcher left on the team, you went out to the mound and pitched until the game was over. Catfish Hunter went five extra innings and took the loss in a 2-1, 15-inning game in 1967. Others have done the same in other years. It's a tradition.

To his credit, the American League's Freddy Garcia, the winner of the '01 All-Star Game, was ready to keep going. "I could have gone another couple of innings," he said after the game. And why not? He'd only worked two innings and thrown 31 pitches. He's a starter who is accustomed to pitching seven or more innings.

The fellow who may need to join the Tin Man and the Scarecrow on the road to Oz could be Phillies pitcher Vicente Padilla. After two innings and just 25 pitches, he apparently gave NL Manager Bob Brenly the impression that he wanted out. Some close to the situation say he didn't warm up well, didn't feel his best. But he felt good enough to pitch two shutout innings. One of the reasons Padilla made the NL team was because, at 24, he's a workhorse who had pitched at least six innings in 14 of his 16 starts.

In this one, it's not the details that matter. It's the whole grotesque sweep of the thing, the way the night encapsulated so much that's wrong with the game.

Baseball acted just as it so often does. The managers were scared of their players. Oh, what if somebody gets a sore arm, what if some other manager gets mad at me. The commissioner was petrified to act like a leader and say, "Play one more inning, damn it, so we have time to prepare the crowd for what's going to happen."

Without the time to make 30 phone calls to reach a consensus, Selig was frozen. Oh, what will Don Fehr say if one of his precious dues-payers files a grievance because he got back to the hotel too late to order room service?

The players just went along with the whole mortifying rip-off. After all, it's just an exhibition, right, and we don't get paid. Well, except for those all-star bonus clauses. But they already kicked in. Hey, it was a good game for 11 innings. Who needs a winner?

Wasn't there anybody in either dugout with enough sense of the traditions of the game to say, "You don't walk off the field with millions of people watching. If Padilla won't pitch, who will? Any volunteers? Gimme an outfielder, a shortstop."

That's what any real team would do in a regular season game if it ran out of pitchers in the 20th inning. Somebody steps up and takes the ball.

For months, the union has said its worst fear about Selig and the owners is that "they have no plan. They just make it up as they go along." That's certainly how it looked Tuesday night.

As soon as the game went into extra innings and each team sent its last pitcher to the mound, Selig should have huddled with Joe Torre and Brenly. Think an inning or two ahead, Bud. If it's expected of every manager in the majors, then why can't the commissioner do it? Stop schmoozing. Watch the game.

If, before the 10th inning or even the 11th inning, it has been announced, "Both teams have used all their players and pitchers. If the game is not decided at the end of the 11th inning, it will be declared a tie," then far fewer people would have complained.

Instead, the announcement came in the middle of the bottom of the last inning!

To a degree, baseball was blindsided by an unusual sequence of events and trends. Only in recent years has the gospel of "play everybody" reached theological proportions. Why? Everybody's afraid of the players. If one gets miffed, maybe he won't come back next year. So, make sure he gets his national-TV face time.

The result is ludicrous. A supposed all-star extravaganza looks like a Rockville Little League game by the fourth inning. How can you take Barry Bonds out of the game after he's been robbed of a home run and hit a home run? What if he hits three homers before the night is over? How can you derail that story line just so that Jose Hernandez and Mike Lowell can get three at-bats?

Ichiro Suzuki, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez got seven at-bats. But A.J. Pierzynski, Robert Fick, Tony Batista and Johnny Damon totaled 11. Wake up, Joe, you're missing a good game. But, hey, Torre got everybody in, didn't he?

Actually, the farcical ending was so bad that it may actually bring some good. Every player and every owner heard those angry chants. The Brewers crowd usually only gets annoyed if the beer is warm or the bratwurst is cold.

Perhaps players (though it's a lot to hope) will think, "We owe the sport more than we're giving back. How can we demand respect if we don't respect the game itself?"

And, after Tuesday, it's to be hoped that no owner thinks as highly of Selig's decision-making ability. There are men who are suited to their period and rise to the occasion. And there are other men, no better or worse on the whole, who are painfully ill-suited to their times and the problems they face.

Selig is the latter. Anybody who can't see that, after the 11th inning on Tuesday night, just isn't paying attention.

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BMTG:

Masten, BMTG:
Bud Selig may look neat, but he is a jerk-off-loving buffoon.

Archie, BMTG:
Total disgrace. Baseball games do not end in ties. There is no clock in baseball. Selig claims there was nothing he could do, but common sense and respect for the game shows that there was plenty he could have done.

Bottom line is that you either have the current pitcher keep going, or you have a position player pitch. There is already a goofy rule that a catcher can re-enter the game - let the catcher come in and pitch, or have someone else in the field pitch, while the catcher takes that position. These are supposed to be all-stars - they should be able to handle a few extra innings. These are supposed to be professional athletes - they are not made of glass.

The solution is NOT to expand rosters. There are plenty of players on the team already. If you must, designate 2 players per team that are there only in the event of extra innings.

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Peter Gammons, ESPN:
This is definitely an embarrassment for Bud Selig. You can't have an All-Star Game end up in a tie. It just can't end that way.

My first complaint is that the managers don't pick enough pitchers for the rosters and the pitchers are just not throwing enough innings.

The 1987 All-Star Game was a perfect example of pitchers being extended early on in the game and it was needed later on as that game went 13 innings. The first three AL pitchers who appeared in that '87 game went a combined seven innings -- Bret Saberhagen started and went three innings, followed by two innings each from Jack Morris and Mark Langston. The first three NL starters went a combined six innings -- Mike Scott started and went two innings, followed by two innings each from Rick Sutcliffe and Orel Hershiser.

Something needs to be done so this doesn't happen again. And ultimately that means adding more players -- pitchers to be exact -- to the rosters.

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Jim Caple, ESPN:

Four tickets for your family to the 2002 All-Star Game: $700

Required additional tickets to the Home Run Derby, Futures Game, Celebrity Game and FanFest that must be purchased in order to buy All-Star Game tickets: $520

Annual credit card interest on those amounts at 19.8 percent: $241

A midsummer classic that ends in a 7-7 tie: Worthless

There are some things money can't buy. But baseball is working on that.

Sadly, this was the perfect, fitting ending to the All-Star Game played in a season that might end with a work stoppage.

Sorry, folks. Glad you enjoyed the first part, but we're calling it a night. Nobody wins. Thanks for your interest. Thanks for your money. Now go home while Bud holds a press conference.

I wrote Monday that the biggest problem with the All-Star Game is that nobody cares who actually wins the game anymore, and Tuesday proved it. Rather than play the game to its logical conclusion -- a victory by either the National or American League -- baseball told the fans to go to hell and called the game after 11 innings with the score tied 7-7.

What a disgrace. The night they name the MVP award after Ted Williams, they didn't have one. What a shame. The night they name the award after a legend who played the entire 1941 All-Star Game and won it with a ninth-inning home run, they stopped playing after 11 innings. What an embarrassment. The night they honor a baseball giant who played the entire All-Star Game several times, they ran out of players.

Ted would be spinning in his grave had his son not frozen him and placed him upside down in a refrigerator.

Of course, fans felt similarly abused after paying $175 a ticket (and remember, baseball now requires that if you want to go to the game, you must buy tickets to the Futures Game, the Home Run Derby and the FanFest as well), only to see the game end in a tie.

Fans in Milwaukee threw garbage on the field and chanted "Let them play," as if it were "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" instead of the All-Star Game. That was fitting, too. After all, the managers treated the game as if it were a Little League game, making sure everyone got into the game so as not to hurt anyone's feelings.

And it was also fitting that no one listened or cared what the fans think. Hey, we have planes to catch, people.

Afterward, managers Joe Torre and Bob Brenly were very defensive, saying they had no choice, that they ran out of players and they weren't going to risk injuring anybody. That's only partially acceptable. Freddy Garcia hadn't pitched in five days, yet he had only pitched two innings and 31 pitches when the game was called. Why couldn't he have pitched longer?

Granted, Torre and Brenly should not have risked injury to any player for an essentially meaningless game. But they managed themselves into that corner by following recent All-Star tradition of running players in and out of the game so quickly.

Barry Zito, one of the best starters in the league, pitched to exactly one batter. He threw three pitches. He was as superfluous as Jimmy Smits in "Attack of the Clones."

Brenly actually screwed up before the game when he put only three starting pitchers on his staff.

Torre, Brenly and Bud Selig sat in front of reporters after the game and said how unfortunate it all was but how it couldn't be avoided. Selig said he thought as hard as he could for a solution -- insert punchline here -- but couldn't come up with one. He talked about how it was a unique and unfortunate situation that had never happened before.

Well, there's a reason it never happened before, Bud. They did things differently in the old days. They let pitchers pitch more than one inning. They let players bat more than once. They didn't care whether everyone played. They tried to win.

You know why the 1941 game Ted Williams won with his homer is so treasured? Because winning was paramount. Not only did Ted play the entire game, so did Joe DiMaggio. Each team used just four pitchers each. You know why we cared so much about the 1970 game that ended in 12 innings? Because Pete Rose cared so much. Because after replacing Hank Aaron midway through the game, he stayed around long enough to crash into Ray Fosse instead of showering and leaving after one at-bat.

It doesn't work that way anymore. That's why interest in the game keeps declining. That's why Tuesday's catastrophe took place. The disaster hit Tuesday, but this has been building for a long time. People will say this was the last thing baseball needed, but this ending was what the All-Star Game needed most.

The All-Star Game once was one of baseball's crown jewels, the true Midsummer Classic. But it has been rotting steadily in recent years while everyone focused on all the glitzy events surrounding the game. Tuesday's travesty will force baseball to address the problems and fix them.

Here's how:
Expand the rosters. As I wrote last week, in 1960 when there were just 16 teams, each league had 30 players on the All-Star team. Now there are nearly twice as many teams and still only 30 players. Expand the rosters to at least 35 and you won't run out of players.

Allow unlimited substitutions. Remember. It's just an exhibition game. Allow managers to put players back into the game if the situation demands it later in the game. That way they can put everybody in if they feel the need and still be covered if the game goes into extra innings.

Don't worry about getting every player into the game. That not only was the problem Tuesday, it's been the problem for at least a decade. The managers concentrate so much on getting everybody into the game that they no longer manage to win. That not only ruins the competitive nature of the game, it leads to situations such as this year when there weren't enough pitchers to go around.

Hey, it's great if everyone can play. But this is the major leagues, not Little League. We don't need to worry about hurt feelings and low self-esteem. If a player doesn't get into the game, tough. He can buy himself a lot of snowcones with the $50,000 incentive clause in his contract. Trust me. The world will survive if Robert Fick doesn't get into the game. If a player is truly an All-Star worth worrying about, he'll be back next year.

Put something on the line. Whether it's who gets home-field advantage in the World Series, or whether the DH gets used, or whether you pit the U.S. against the World or old guys against young stars, put something at stake. Give the players some incentive to play other than the bonus clause in their contract. In short, make people care about the game's outcome again.

People may not care who wins the All-Star Game anymore. But they sure as hell care that someone wins.

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Joe Morgan, ESPN:
Well, it finally happened: The All-Star Game, a game created for the fans, has proven that it isn't.

Tuesday's game was an embarrassment to baseball and to past All-Stars who played to win the game. Because the emphasis is now placed on getting every player in the game, the Midsummer Classic has been reduced to a meaningless exhibition.

A tie game? There are no ties in baseball. Maybe in football and hockey, but not baseball. Yet now we have a tie in -- of all things -- the game that is supposed to be a showcase for the both the sport and the fans.

I'm glad the fans at Miller Park were vehement in their disapproval. Although they were asked to be understanding, why should they understand? They paid $175 or more for their tickets -- and saw a tie.

I had to fly to Los Angeles early Wednesday morning, and I pulled up at the hotel at the same time as Seattle SuperSonics guard Gary Payton. He and his friends asked me, "Who won the game?" I said, "It was a tie." And Gary said, "You mean the AL tied it in the bottom of the ninth." I said, "Yeah." He said, "But then who won?" I just told them it was a tie, but they couldn't believe it -- "What do you mean, 'a tie'?"

All-Star managers Joe Torre and Bob Brenly each had one pitcher left after nine innings, Seattle's Freddy Garcia and Philadelphia's Vicente Padilla respectively. But the fans were sent home without an outcome because Torre and Brenly had used every other pitcher and didn't want Garcia and Padilla to get hurt.

Garcia and Padilla make their living as pitchers. How are they more likely to hurt themselves in the All-Star Game than they would be pitching seven or eight innings during their next starts this weekend?

I understand Torre's and Brenly's reasoning; they felt their fellow managers would be upset if they used any of the pitchers too long. But the All-Star Game is not about any individual team or player. It's about Major League Baseball and its fans.

The players and managers at the All-Star Game must forget about their teams back home and remember why they are there -- for the fans, for the good of the game, and to heighten interest for the second half. In Milwaukee, Garcia and Padilla were performing for their leagues, for Major League Baseball and for the fans, not for the Mariners and the Phillies.

Tuesday's unfortunate ending could have been avoided, starting with the makeup of each team. Expanding the rosters is not the answer and would make things worse because the managers would try to get even more players into the game. Instead, they need to choose the right players, meaning fewer relief pitchers and more starting pitchers.

Torre had four closers (Eddie Guardado, Mariano Rivera, Sasaki and Ugueth Urbina), while Brenly had six closers (Mike Williams, Eric Gagne, Trevor Hoffman, Byung-Hyun Kim, Robb Nen and John Smoltz) and one setup man (Mike Remlinger). Because the relief pitchers are used to pitching only one inning, the managers pin themselves into a corner. Plus, the save is an overglorified statistic, one not as important as wins and losses or innings pitched.

Both managers needed starting pitchers who could pitch two innings or more, as they used to do in the All-Star Game. In the past, if the National League team had Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Juan Marichal and Don Drysdale, that was all it needed.

When I played in the 1970 All-Star Game, one of the greatest ever, the NL used five pitchers -- Tom Seaver, Jim Merritt, Gaylord Perry, Gibson and Claude Osteen -- and still had three more on the bench -- Wayne Simpson, Hoyt Wilhelm and Joe Hoerner -- when the game ended in the 12th inning. Again, the managers tried to win the game, not to play everyone.

At the same time, the fans deserve to see the game's biggest stars play much longer than they do. The fans want to see more of players like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and Ichiro, but they rarely hit more than twice. In fact, the only starting players to hit three times Tuesday were Scott Rolen and Jorge Posada. Bonds hit one home run, had another one taken away and then was out of the game.

As the game was ending, I was at the Milwaukee airport with Cal Ripken, who told me he played the entire game in 1994, when Moises Alou won it with an RBI double. Likewise, in 1972, I ended up being the game's MVP because I played the whole game and drove in the game-winning run with a hit off McNally in the 10th inning.

Our manager, Pittsburgh's Danny Murtaugh, told us, "I'm going to play our best players until we win the game." I took it as a compliment. Plus, I wanted to play the entire game.

I admit that it is tougher for today's players to go to the All-Star Game. In the past, the players practiced on Monday and played the game on Tuesday. Now, from the time they arrive until game time, the players are involved in far more All-Star-related activities than I was as a player. The two-day event takes a toll on the players.

Nevertheless, their objective should remain the same -- win the game. Ripken told me he enjoyed the All-Star Game much more when it was competitive. I remember one All-Star manager in the last 10 years saying he was going to try to play every player. Somehow, that has become the theme for the games that have followed.

The league president used to enter the clubhouse and make a speech, telling us to win the game for the National League. But since there are no longer league presidents, that role should fall on the commissioner. From now on, Selig needs to instruct each All-Star manager to play the game to win and to not worry about getting every player in the game. If the commissioner removed the burden from the managers, then the game may be played differently in the future.

Tuesday's game was yet another black eye for Selig. When I spoke to him once about more managerial opportunities for minorities, I told him, "Bud, I understand part of your problem. When you are so busy putting out fires, you can never move forward." And during his time as commissioner, that is what Selig has been doing -- putting out fires with the players' union, over contraction and over steroids. And now the All-Star Game is another log thrown into the flame.

Of the problems Selig faces, the All-Star Game may be the simplest one to handle. But the scar will linger. Instead of fading away, the effects of Tuesday's outcome may grow worse as time goes by. And no matter how forcefully the fans condemn baseball's actions, they won't force the game's problems to get resolved any quicker. If that were the case, the 1994 World Series would have never been cancelled.

Although the All-Star mess is smaller in magnitude than the World Series cancellation, they are the same -- things that baseball handled improperly. It's like robbing a small bank or a big bank; both are still wrong.

Before baseball can move forward and return the focus to the game on the field, the onus is on the commissioner's office to revamp its strategy for promoting the game, to improve its relationship with the players' union and to run the game better than it did Tuesday night.

Yet even if Major League Baseball is able to extinguish each fire individually, people will still point to July 9, 2002, as the day baseball once again hit the bottom.

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Gordon Edes, Boston Globe:
Just as surely as San Francisco Giants catcher Benito Santiago, the final batter of the 73d All-Star Game, was buckled by a curveball from Seattle's Freddy Garcia in the bottom of the 11th, baseball commissioner Bud Selig was caught looking.

Boxed in by two managers bent on making sure everyone selected for the game would have their 'Star turn, Selig made the one decision guaranteed to reinforce his public image of a well-intentioned but overmatched czar of his sport. At a time when he needed to think out of the box, an agitated Selig, the fingernails of one hand clawing into the palm of his other, could not summon the imagination that might have spared him what was surely one of the most painful episodes of a lifetime spent in the game.

Selig, already saddled with the label of the Man Who Canceled the World Series, is now the Man Who Called the All-Star Game a Tie. Only eight months after enduring ridicule in front of Congress, where he was played the fool by a buffoon, Jesse Ventura, Selig invoked the wrath of the burghers of his hometown. On a night that was made-to-order for bows, Selig heard boos instead.

''This is not the ending I had hoped for,'' Selig said in a postgame press conference that was supposed to celebrate the game's stars. ''But I was in a no-win situation. Frankly, I had no alternative.''

Yes, he did. Selig could not change the fact that the All-Star rosters included no fewer than 10 closers, pitchers programmed to work only an inning. He could not change the fact that nine pitchers threw 15 pitches or fewer, including Oakland lefthander Barry Zito, who threw three, or that Joe Torre's American League bullpen did not have a lefthander after he used both Zito and Minnesota's Eddie Guardado in the sixth inning.

Figure that each of those nine pitchers had been asked to throw 10 more pitches apiece. That's 90 pitches, the equivalent of three more innings.

He could not change the fact that four times in the last four innings, the potential winning run was in scoring position, twice just 90 feet away, and no one claimed the hero's role.

But Selig certainly didn't have to announce in the middle of the 11th that the game would be declared a tie if the National League failed to score in its last at-bat. That left baseball open to the suspicion that Garcia might be ordered to groove a few pitches to avoid a tie. That did not happen, though no one would really have complained if Garcia had elected to challenge Santiago with a fastball under the circumstances.

And Selig has no excuse for not having a plan for such a contingency, instead of feverishly trying to ward off disaster as the clock ticked well past midnight.

Could Garcia and Philadelphia's Vicente Padilla have pitched another inning? Sure. They were on their regular turn, and if the managers of their respective teams were forced to juggle their rotations a day or two, so be it. Call it the price of being an All-Star. But according to NL manager Bob Brenly, Padilla had complained of some stiffness while warming up, so Selig made the right call in placing the players' health at the forefront of his decision.

He just didn't look out for his own well-being. What could he have done? Selig could have summoned the honorary captains, former Brewer Robin Yount, who is wildly popular in Milwaukee, and Ozzie Smith, who in a month will be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and sent them to home plate to make an announcement. They could have first reminded the fans of what a vastly entertaining game they had been watching, including what may have been the greatest defensive play in All-Star history, Torii Hunter's homer-stealing catch of Barry Bonds's drive to the center-field wall. Then they could have explained the reasons why the game could not continue, which were legitimate.

Would there have been some boos? Sure. But the guess here is those boos would have expired when Yount and Smith announced that while the game was going into the books as a tie, baseball felt it owed one to the fans who had paid as much as $175 a ticket to be there, as well as the fans on the East Coast who had stayed up into the wee hours to watch on TV. Those fans, they could have said, deserved the satisfaction of a winner and a loser.

How to do it? Stealing a page from soccer, which resorts to penalty-kick shootouts for games deadlocked in overtime, Yount and Smith could have announced a Home Run Hitoff between the two sides. If it's good enough for the World Cup, it's good enough for a baseball exhibition.

Three players from each team, five swings apiece against a coach, team with the most home runs at the end of 15 swings is the winner. Still tied? Sudden-death derby.

Unconventional? Of course. Flawed? Sure. Unbaseball-like? No doubt.

Better than the fiasco that baseball ended up with?

A Sausage Race between the teams would have been better than baseball's solution.

And yes, someone would have gone home with the first Ted Williams MVP Award.

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Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe:
This was brutal.

Major League Baseball, already clouded by a strike threat and suspicions of players on steroids, somehow managed to screw up its All-Star Game last night.

It was a pretty fun game for the first 101/2 innings. But as the clock groaned toward 1 a.m. back East, there was trouble in Brew-town. Both managers had used all their players and this being 2002, it was too much to ask for the fellows to settle things on the field.

The game ended in a 7-7 tie. And Commissioner Bud Selig was roundly booed in his own park.

Yeesh.

You could see trouble coming when there was a long conference near the commissioner's box after the American League went out in the top of the 11th. Both managers and the umpires met with Selig. It was agreed that the game would be called if it remained tied after 11.

With one out in the bottom of the 11th, the public address announcer told the crowd the bad news. Folks who had forked over $175 for box seats learned that this actually was no different than a spring training game.

The Rhinelanders booed for the rest of the inning as Selig - already under siege - shrank in his box seat. It had to be a terrible moment for Bud to hear the booing on this most anticipated and festive of nights in his new ballpark.

Brutal.

Naturally, the National League didn't score and the game ended, 7-7, on a called third strike to Benito Santiago.

''We had called the game this evening and I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the fans that were here,'' said Selig, who looked as if his dog just died. ''Their unhappiness was understood by all of us. In the middle of the inning, both managers told me they were out of players.

''They had used everybody because they wanted to get everybody in the game, but in your wildest dreams you wouldn't have conceived this game would end in a tie, but given the health of the players and where they were at that point, I had no choice. As much as I hated to do it, and with all the reluctance in the world, I really had no choice but to end that game at the end of the 11th. ''It would have become a worse farce in the 12th inning ... This is not the ending we had hoped for. This is the first time it has ever happened. It is very regrettable and very sad.''

''I feel bad for Bud, especially here,'' said AL manager Joe Torre.

Why not a home run derby between Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds? How about penalty kicks?

No. Instead, we got spring training baseball or a regular-season NHL game. We got a tie.

This was a problem waiting to happen. Torre and NL manager Bob Brenly both tried to get all 30 players into the game. They accomplished that, but then had no relief pitchers for the potential 12th or 13th innings.

''You can't have it both ways,'' said Torre. ''Fans want to see all the stars, but the last thing I want to do is get a pitcher hurt.''

Seattle's Freddy Garcia was on the mound for the AL at the finish. A regular starter, he was working on four days' rest and isn't scheduled to pitch again for another five days. He pitched two innings. The NL had Philadelphia's Vicente Padilla, who also pitched two innings and had nothing left. Brenly, who was particularly quick to remove players early in the game, said, ''It's highly improper to try to place blame on anybody for this thing. It happens. Unfortunately the game got tied up.''

Many fans lingered and booed for a half hour after the field was cleared. Some chanted, ''Let them play,'' ''Bud Must Go,'' and ''We want a refund.'' It was a truly hideous conclusion. Selig is not a particularly lucky fellow these days. This was the night when the All-Star Game MVP trophy was named in honor of Ted Williams. But the game ended with no one being named MVP.

Brutal.

''This is not the way I wanted this to end,'' said Selig. ''I am saddened by it.''

And baseball is embarrassed. Again.

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Jayson Stark, ESPN:
They played an All-Star Game on Tuesday, and nobody won. You know what that means.

It's time to start looking for somebody to blame.

So line up the usual suspects:

Blame it on Bud. That's what we're all programmed to do, anyway. It was his town. It was his game. It was his decision to have everybody go home after 11 innings with nobody ahead. So go ahead. We'll authorize it. Blame it on Bud.

No, wait. Blame it on Torii Hunter. If he hadn't showed off his 97-inch vertical leap and pulled a Barry Bonds all-star homer out of Venus orbit and back into the yard in the first inning, the National League would have won 8-7. In nine spectacular innings. So yeah, now it's all clear. Blame it on Torii Hunter.

Uhh, hold on a second. Curt Schilling has it all figured out: "It's Adam Dunn's fault," Schilling announced. "If he just hits it out (instead of smoking a rocket to the warning track in the 10th), the game's over." OK, sounds plausible enough. We call Mr. Dunn to the stand. "Yeah, it's all my fault," Dunn said. "I'll take it. I only brought one bat. I figured I'd bring the maple bat because it wouldn't break. And maple stinks. So it's my fault. He's absolutely right."

But that's too easy. Because we just remembered it's actually Warren Giles' fault -- for not living well into his second century. Every year, we hear some old-timer reminisce about the good old days, when Giles was the National League president, and he'd stomp into the NL locker room before the game and make like Vince Lombardi. Back in those days, if the National League didn't win, good old Warren Giles threatened to void all their contracts, force them to travel by freight train and limit their postgame spread to bread, water and brussels sprouts. So if Warren Giles was still alive, winning would still matter, doggone it. Somehow, in the intervening years, something apparently changed, because now, we're told, the most important thing is to Get Everybody Into The Game. Which allows everybody the excuse to wimp out by saying, "We had to go. We ran out of players." Well, Warren Giles would never have gone for that, friends. So it's all his fault.

It's extremely important, don't you think, at times like this, that we blame somebody, anybody? Pick your villain. Call the cops. Because what happened Tuesday night at Miller Park was, very simply, a debacle for a sport that seems to be cornering the market on debacle production these days.

No matter how logical the explanations were -- from the commish, from the managers, from the emergency pitchers and their teammates -- pulling the plug on this All-Star Game ruined what could have been, what SHOULD have been, a beautiful and unforgettable showcase for everything that was great about baseball.

It's simple, really. You can't charge people 150 bucks a ticket and not play until somebody wins. You can't tell the nation that this is the only All-Star Game left that's still a real game and then tell them four hours later that it doesn't matter if anybody wins.

You can't spend an hour before the game trotting out the men responsible for some of baseball's most memorable moments -- many of them game-ending hits and homers, by the way -- and then spend 11 terrific innings setting the stage for another one of those memorable moments, and then decide, "Aw, never mind." You can't have this happen. Can't. Period. No matter how well-meaning this decision was.

"I really had no choice," said Bud Selig.

"I apologize," said Joe Torre.

"It's an unfortunate situation," said Bob Brenly.

And we sympathize with all of them. Really.

"The last thing I want to do is get a pitcher hurt," Torre said.

"These organizations, their managers, entrust us with their players," said Brenly, whose last pitcher, the Phillies' Vicente Padilla, had trouble getting loose while warming up prior to the 10th inning. "And the last thing we want to do is send home a guy who is not going to be able to compete for the ballclub that's paying his salary."

We understand all that, too.

But what we need here, apparently, is a redefinition of what this game is. It never USED to be the object of the All-Star Game to play everybody. It USED to be the object to play the game until its proper conclusion.

It must have been, since five previous All-Star games went more innings than this one, and every one of them ended with a winner. The last one of those was just in 1987, too. And we don't recall any fan balloting since then on whether to change that object.

We guarantee you -- absolutely, positively, or your money back -- that if Randy Winn or Ugueth Urbina hadn't gotten into this game, NO ONE in the seats would have booed, thrown a beer bottle or chanted, "Bud must go."

But decide not to finish what you start? THAT was an invitation for martial law to break out. And it just about did.

"We've got to make changes," said Schilling, one of the few men you can depend on in sports to be standing there after a game like this, ready to deliver pointed opinions without even requiring you to put a quarter in his slot. "We can't let this happen."

Bingo.

"I've got two solutions," Schilling said. "One, increase the rosters and just tell guys that some of them won't play unless the game goes extra innings. Or two, play nine innings no matter what. Tell everybody from the start. And then, if it's tied, each team picks one guy, and you decide it with a Home Run Derby. How great would THAT be?"

Great? It's more than great. It's genius. Uh, is it too late to send Giambi and Sosa back out there? Is it too late to make Curt Schilling commissioner? Is it too late to at least ask Ralph Branca to get loose?

We'd have settled for just about any outcome Tuesday night other than the one we got -- assuming "outcome" is the proper word for it. From the moment the bottom of the 11th inning got held up so Bud could scratch his forehead and agonize, this scene turned too bizarre for words.

First off, it was a real bad idea to announce to 41,000 people that they were about to witness the final half-inning of their evening -- win, lose, draw or temporary restraining order.

"If we win the game in the bottom of the 11th and no announcement is made," said John Smoltz, "no one knows a thing about it. I think that was the way to go."

But that wasn't the way they went. So next, we had the surreal scene of seeing the potential winning run, in the person of Mike Lowell, advance to second on a single and wild pitch -- only to have the pitcher, Padilla, up there trying to drive him in.

Padilla occasionally switch-hits, when he's in the mood. (Don't ask.) But in this crucial spot -- game on the line, crowd turning ugly -- he chose to hit right-handed against a right-hander, Freddy Garcia.

Asked if he had any theories on why Padilla didn't hit left-handed, his teammate, Scott Rolen said: "Well, I had to run in and get him MY helmet. And I'm right-handed. So I don't think hitting left-handed was an option."

Padilla, of course, struck out. So that left it all up to Benito Santiago, playing in his first All-Star Game in 10 years. Santiago marched up there amid boos, hoots and a rising, not-very-complimentary chant about the commissioner. So he knew this was going to be an at-bat he'd never forget.

"I looked behind me," he said. "And somebody had a big sign: 'Tie games are only for hockey.'"

Well, not anymore, apparently. Santiago struck out to end it. So this tie game obliterated just about everything that came before it. This tie game planted one more shiner on the already-too-pockmarked face of baseball.

And worst of all, this tie game managed the theoretically impossible task of turning a thrilling, chilling, pregame ceremony from a lump-in-the-throat classic into a minor subplot.

"We had one of the best beginnings to an All-Star Game I've ever seen," said Smoltz. "And I guess some will say we had one of the worst endings to an All-Star Game we've ever seen."

Precisely. No one all night said it better -- except possibly for Bob Brenly, who wanted really badly to convince the baseball fans of America it wasn't as bad as it looked.

"They got everything you could ask for in an All-Star Game," Brenly said, "except a winner."

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Other Reactions:

Tom Whaley, St. Paul Saints team vice president:
We've petitioned the league to investigate the prospect of having all our games end in tie scores. We thereby reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt physically or emotionally by the random vagaries associated with on-field losses or extra innings.

Lance Berkman, Houston Astros:
It was a blast, a great game. And the fans got more than their money's worth. They only paid for nine innings, so they got two innings free.

Fay Vincent, former Commissioner:
It was just awful. The general consensus was that it was a disaster for baseball. The brand of baseball was hurt very badly .... How can you not anticipate it going extra innings? It's preposterous.

The whole thing made baseball look like a joke. Nobody was thinking. The quality of intellectual effort was very, very low. How do you screw up an All-Star Game? These guys managed to do that. That's pretty hard to do. It's almost impossible to have an All-Star Game end on a disastrous note.

I'd be astonished if there aren't a fair number of owners who wonder if they're in the right hands. Bud seems to have gotten some very bad advice. You can't end it that way. You can't have it end in such a whimper. There has to be a bang. It's entertainment. The one thing he did was the one thing he shouldn't have done.

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Question 3 of "10 Burning Questions for Bud Selig", ESPN:
Jim Caple:
Having had a month to think it over, would you have handled the All-Star situation any differently, given that it was pretty much dumped in your lap?

Bud Selig:
No. That's one thing in the retrospect of history you can look back at, but I did the only thing I could at the time. It broke my heart. When Sandy Alderson came to see me in the last of the 10th or the top of the 11th, he said, "I've got tough news for you. This game has to end." I said, "What?" I was stunned. I only had a minute or two to make a decision, and he swiftly reviewed all of my options. Sandy had talked to Joe Torre, and I said, "I want to see both managers." I could see the look on their faces. They were done. I was very troubled by the Philadelphia pitcher Vincente Padilla and his condition. The umpire, Jerry Davis, came over and said, "The pitcher is having trouble getting loose."

That was very sad. I didn't want it to happen, but I didn't want to risk a home run hitting contest. Some writers said I should have told the managers, "You got me into this mess, now get me out of it." But that sort of thing would have led to position players pitching, and if someone had gone out there and gotten hurt or the game turns into a travesty with 10 runs scoring ... all that just crossed my mind. It was very painful.

But I have a lot of ideas for the All-Star game, and what we should do. I won't go into them, but we need to go back to the way the All-Star Game was played. Pitchers pitching longer.

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