Sometimes it pays to be lucky. Here I am making my Web site debut and just in time for the All-Star game. I couldn’t have planned it any better.

I would’ve been distraught had I not made it before the game was played because it has become my favorite game of the entire year. Opening day? World Series? They don’t compare.

Would you like to know why the All-Star game has become my favorite game? I thought you’d never ask. It has become my favorite game because Commissioner Bud Selig says it should be.

All right, the commissioner has never put it exactly that way, but for several years now he has made the All-Star game the most critical game of the year, linking it to the World Series even before we know who is going to play in the World Series.

As I’m sure you know, especially if you have been watching games on Fox, the pennant winner from the league that wins the All-Star game gets home-field advantage. That is, the team gets to play the first two games and, if necessary, the last two games at home. The pennant winner from the league that loses the All-Star game has to settle for the middle three games.

There is no magic formula to this system. For a hundred years, the leagues alternated the start of the World Series. One year the National League champion played the first two games at home; the next year the American League champion was at home for the first two games.

But several years ago, the alternate-years format was changed because Fox wanted it to change. It wasn’t that the World Series network was unhappy with the World Series. Fox was unhappy with the All-Star game, which it also televises.

The ratings achieved by the All-Star game were in steady decline, and Fox wanted – demanded – something that would attract more viewers for the mid-season exhibition game.

“Wait, I have an idea,” someone said as a light bulb went on brightly over his head in the second panel of the cartoon. (The first panel showed the Fox executive telling Selig that they had to do something about the All-Star ratings.) “Why don’t we link home-field advantage for the World Series to the All-Star game? That will surely attract millions of more viewers.”

Why would the scheme attract more viewers? For one thing, the thinking went, the game would become significant, inducing fans to be glued to their televisions thinking, “I can’t wait to see which league wins the game and which league will have home-field advantage in the World Series three months from now when it’s unlikely that the team I root for will even be in the World Series.”

But for another thing, the thinking continued, establishing the link will prompt the all-star players to play with greater intensity, and that will produce a better game and have viewers sitting on the edge of their seats practically unable to contain themselves, the excitement will be so overwhelming.

The players? Of course, the World Series link will inspire them to hit the ball farther and run faster, taking an extra base for the good of the Red Sox or the Yankees even though they play for the Royals and the Blue Jays and the Mariners.

Baseball and Fox officials have said recent games have been played more intensely, but they are seeing what they want to see, not what actually is there.

The World Series link certainly hasn’t convinced the fans. Last year’s game attracted 12.5 million viewers, second smallest number since Nielsen Media Research began computing such records. The smallest viewership, 12.3 million, came in 2005, the third year of the link.

Fox’s own figures demonstrate that the link has not helped. In the three years before the All-Star game was linked to the World Series, the All-Star game was watched by 14.7 million, 16 million and 14.6 million. In the five years the All-Star game and the World Series have been connected, the Fox viewership has been 13.7 million, 13.9 million, 12.3 million, 14.4 million and 12.5 million.

Clearly the alleged added significance of the All-Star game has not lured fans to their television sets.

But baseball and Fox surge forward with their silly scheme. There are ways to create a more meaningful way of determining home-field advantage for the World Series if that’s what they really want to do. But none of the methods would help Fox’s ratings for the All-Star game.

One way would be to reward the team with the better won-lost record. But that idea wouldn’t work logistically. Baseball can’t wait until days or even a week before the World Series is scheduled to start to determine where Series game will be played. Airlines and hotels don’t work that way.

If baseball, on the other hand, based homefield advantage on the outcome of interleague games, the winning league this season would have been known before the end of June, leaving three months, or half the season, to make travel plans.

But the outcome of the interleague schedule would do nothing for Fox and its ratings for the All-Star game. Don’t let a sound idea get in the way of greed.

So the exhibition game that is the All-Star game will continue to play a significant role in the outcome of the World Series. But home-field advantage is too important to have it be determined by an exhibition game, most of whose players won’t play in that year’s World Series.

In the last eight World Series that went seven games, from 1982 through 2002, the home team won every time.

During the Fox telecast of the Rockies-Mets game last Saturday, one of the announcers said of the Colorado manager, Clint Hurdle, “Clint knows from experience how important home-field advantage is.” The Rockies, he added, won 21 of 22 games last season, then went to Boston and lost the first two games of the World Series en route to a Red Sox four-game sweep.

But the Rockies didn’t lose those first two games simply because they were played at Fenway Park. The absence of home-field advantage didn’t affect the Rockies in the first two rounds of the playoffs. They won the first two games in Philadelphia, and they won the first two games in Arizona.

Whatever impact home-field advantage has, getting it by having the team’s league win the All-Star game makes no sense.

Selig would never admit it, but I suspect that if he were not the commissioner but just a fan he would scoff at the idea of basing home-field advantage in the World Series on the All-Star game. But I wouldn’t ask him the question. It would very likely force him to say something he probably wouldn’t mean.