Bud’s Big Bash has arrived. It began Wednesday night in San Francisco. You know it as the World Series.
By now, you probably also know it has started in San Francisco because the Giants are the National League champions and the National League won this year’s All-Star game. Commissioner Bud Selig and baseball’s club owners decided a decade ago to link the outcome of the All-Star game with homefield advantage for the World Series. If you don’t remember that origin of the site of Games 1, 2, 6 and 7, be assured I will remind you of it once or twice a year.
I do that because I believe the link is the silliest step Selig has taken among his many major worthy decisions, and I keep hoping he will wake up one day, come to his senses, conclude the link is a silly idea and end it.
It is silly because the All-Star game is an exhibition game and should not determine any aspect of the most important event of baseball’s year. It is silly because it hasn’t done anything for the All-Star game. It is silly because the link hasn’t done anything for Fox’s television ratings, which was the intent behind the creation of the link.
In the last five years of the 10-year link, Fox’s ratings have dropped steadily, thudding to an all-time low 6.8 for this year’s game, which also attracted the fewest viewers ever, 10.9 million. Despite the constant drop, the commissioner and other misguided supporters of the idea say, the reward of homefield advantage has enhanced the game, inspiring players to play harder, thus raising the quality of the games.
I wonder if when they say such silly things, they have this year’s game in mind. This year’s game was over in the first inning. The National League scored five runs in the first, three on a two-out triple slugged by Pablo Sandoval against Justin Verlander. Melky Cabrera started the first-inning outburst with a single and added a two-run home run in the fourth, raising the N.L. lead to 8-0.
That was it, for the scoring, that is. What about the extra excitement the link was supposed to create, the added intensity? The game that was supposedly made more exciting for the fans – make that Fox fans – produced nothing in the final five and a half innings. The A.L. loaded the bases in the fifth inning? Wow! Two N.L. relievers struck out the side in the eighth? Supersensational!
Maybe if it had been a 1-0 game. But it was 8-0. Only a seven or eight-run rally could have saved this game, and it didn’t come close to happening.
In retrospect, however, the linksters could point to the game as having foreshadowed the World Series. Most often in the era of the link the players who make significant contributions to the outcome of the games in July are home in October. Not this year.
Sandoval, who gave the N.L. a 4-0 lead with his bases-loaded triple July 10, and Verlander faced each other again in Game 1 of the World Series, the first time in the first inning. The outcome? Sandoval belted a home run. They reprised that act in the third inning. This time it was a two-run homer. The large third baseman – he is listed as 242 pounds in the Giants’ media guide but looks much bigger – hit yet a third home run in the fifth inning, but Verlander was gone by then.
Cabrera, on the other hand, is not in the World Series following his 50-game suspension Aug. 15 for use of a banned substance. By the start of the Series, Cabrera had completed his suspension and was eligible to play, but the Giants opted to leave him off the roster, a decision most people seemed to endorse.
The game in which Sandoval destroyed Verlander and the Tigers was played at AT&T Park in San Francisco because the National League won the All-Star game. Until 2003 the leagues alternated what became known as homefield advantage. Does it exist? Yes and no.
The Giants’ first-game victory gave the home team a 29-18 record (.617) in World Series games since the introduction of the link, according to Elias Sports Bureau. 
That’s obviously an impressive record and shows that homefield advantage has been important in the World Series. The team with homefield advantage has won six of the nine World Series since 2003 (all but 2003, 2006 and 2008).
Looking at a bigger picture, the Giants’ first-game victory brought to .500 (17-17) the record for all post-season game this year. There obviously hasn’t been as much of a homefield advantage over-all this post-season. From 2003 up the World Series this year, Elias says, home teams had a 177-148 record (.545).
Eliminating this post-season as an aberration, it would seem that there’s some significance to this homefield advantage thing. If that is so and they’re going to award the advantage to one league or the other, wouldn’t it make sense to determine homefield advantage by something more important than the All-Star game? Ten years of Fox foolishness is enough.
A reader has suggested that even if the Fox ratings have gone down, down, down, maybe the link has prevented them from falling even lower. That could be, but that’s not enough to justify use of a meaningless exhibition game to decide which team should gain a 60 percent advantage over the other. At $22 million a year, the commissioner, with the help of his committee of former players and executives that he touts, should be able to come up with a better, more equitable plan.
Yes, Selig, like Fox, would like to see higher television ratings for the All-Star game, but everything else in baseball is working well. Selig should be satisfied with that.