Reports from the All-Star game last week bordered on giddiness. At Nelson Cruz’s request, Yadier Molina, using Cruz’s phone, took a picture of Cruz with Joe West, the home plate umpire, before Cruz batted in the sixth inning.

Molina did what? He took a picture? On the field? In the sixth inning? What kind of game were they playing?

It was unusual, to be sure. But Cruz obviously felt liberated and acted on that feeling. The All-Star game was no longer linked to the World Series with the winning league’s pennant winner getting home field advantage.

The foolish idea, a Bud Selig creation in cahoots with FOX, existed for 14 years. It was quietly laid to rest last year during the negotiations for a new labor agreement between the owners and the players.

“We didn’t think it was necessary,” said a person on the union side. “They were looking to give it up, too. It was not a subject of much debate. It wasn’t controversial.”

It certainly didn’t prevent the two sides from reaching an agreement for the fourth consecutive time without a strike or a lockout.

The gimmick was ridiculous. FOX, which pays baseball a lot of money for the rights to games, regular and post-season, complained that its ratings for the All-Star game were declining, and Selig agreed to enhance the stature of the game by making it count for something.

If home field advantage were awarded the team from the game’s winning league, it would encourage players to play harder and make for a more competitive game.

Selig and others connected to Major League Baseball spent the next dozen or so years trying to convince fans and the news media that players were playing the All-Star games with greater intensity than they did before the link. And even after the link was disabled, there was this:

“Whether it counts or not, I sense a little more intensity.”

Joe Buck, the FOX announcer, said that during the game, and Selig couldn’t have said it better.

Buck was in the ballpark and I wasn’t so maybe he had a better vantage point to discern the intensity.

Close, low-scoring games always seem more intense (1-0 vs. 10-2, for example), but that feeling is in the mind of the viewer (some fans don’t like 1-0 games; I love them).

Buck asked Joe Maddon, manager of the Chicago Cubs and the N.L. team, how it was managing in this All-Star game. “The fact that the game doesn’t count makes it easier,” he said, comparing this game to his 2009 experience. Of course, he won that game and lost this one.

I’ll take Maddon at his word, but I’m not sure about some of the writers who covered this All-Star game. It struck me in some cases of what was written that they had made up their minds before the game, approaching it with their minds already made up that the absence of the World Series link produced a different environment.

I liked Bryce Harper’s answer to a Buck question, feeling it was honest compared to some of the things that were written.

Harper, playing right field for the National League, was miked, as was George Springer of the American, and was asked if the lack of World Series implications took “any of the fun out of this, the intensity out of this.”

“No way,” Harper replied. “As baseball players, I feel like we compete every single day. It’s hard for the NFL, having them play exhibition games, that Pro Bowl. If they go full bore, they’re going to kill somebody. … It’s tough for them. But this game right here, we still go at it and get it and we want to get that ‘W.’”

One of the foolish aspects of the link was the assumption that a player, say, from the San Diego Padres would play harder than he otherwise would to get the Cubs home-field advantage for the World Series.

In the days when there were two distinct leagues with separate league offices and presidents, before interleague play obliterated the separation of the leagues, a player might have felt a touch of league pride. In those days, Warren Giles, N.L. president from 1951 to 1969, gave the N.L. players a fiery pre-game speech, stressing the importance of winning the game.

They usually did, winning 17 of 22 games during Giles’ presidency.

There are no longer league presidents to give fiery speeches and worry about which league wins the game. The focus these days is on television ratings, and they don’t paint a comforting picture.

In the days of the World Series link, ratings fell 9 times, stayed even once and rose, never by much, four times. Last year’s rating, 5.4, was the lowest ever, and the number of viewers, 8.7 million, was the lowest ever, falling below 10 million for the first time.

The final figures for this year’s game were not available by the time this column was posted, but the overnight figures were said to approximate last year’s.

As for the change of environment the game experienced with the elimination of the World Series link, you might remember an incident that was better than the Cruz photo-op.

In the 2002 games Torii Hunter robbed Barry Bonds of a home run, leaping above the center field fence and snaring Bonds’ drive. As the teams changed sides, Bonds good naturedly grabbed Hunter and picked him up, carrying him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes for several steps.

See Barry Bonds at 2002 All-Star Game

STRIKEOUTS ASCENDING

This year’s low-scoring game produced some grumbling and dissatisfaction with the game, but it might have been the forerunner of games to come.

As the accompanying chart shows, strikeouts have been on a steady rise, from 12.60 per game in the first year of the World Series link to 16.42 before the All-Star break this year. With no indication of the trend slowing, it figures to continue.

Strikeouts have also increased, according to the work of Bob Waterman of the Elias Sports Bureau.

No matter how good All-Star hitters are, the All-Star pitchers are throwing harder than ever. And in many instances they are pitching only a single inning, meaning they can let it loose and not save themselves for second or third inning as All-Star pitchers once did.

Managers are also using more relief pitchers, most of them hard throwers, and they often get one or two strikeouts in their inning of work.

More strikeouts usually mean fewer baserunners and thus fewer runs.