Joe Girardi last managed in the MLB All-Star Game in 2010, and he has some gripes about the format.
The Yankee manager believes that the rule that every team must be represented should be thrown out, with the 25 best players from each league on the roster.
“If the game has that much importance, I think you should take whatever your best roster is,” Girardi said Saturday, via Brendan Kuty of NJ Advance Media. “Bottom line. I know they wanted to get away from what happened a couple of years ago [in the tied game in 2002], but I found it really hard, as a manager, to tell a player that he wasn’t going to play and hold him back.”
Girardi also feels that players should be allowed to re-enter the game under certain circumstances.
“I thought that was really unfair,” Girardi continued. “If you want to make it count, I think you ought to have reentry rules in a sense. I don’t think that’s right. It might be a player’s only All-Star Game. You’re not going to play? That bothers me.
“It’s tough. You think about all the work they put in and they probably dream about playing next to some of those guys and you don’t get a chance. If it is going to count, I think there are some rules they should really look at.”
Major League Baseball has long struggled to balance their tradition of involving the fans with staging a competitive, meaningful game since the winning league started receiving home field advantage in the World Series in 2003. Everything Girardi suggests makes sense, although re-entry for pitchers is probably unfeasible with the potential for throwing and getting cold again. If MLB wants to stage a truly competitive game, they have to go all the way with it. Cut out fan voting to prevent things like this from taking place, kill the rule that puts a player from every team in the game, and play it like it’s a regular game that matters. Either that or go to my preferred option — let the fans vote, let every team have a representative, and restore the game to being an exhibition, giving World Series home field to whichever team in it has the superior record. It just makes sense.
