We have arrived at my favorite time of the baseball season: the All-Star game.

Why is it my favorite time of the season? Certainly not because I get excited seeing the best players in each league playing against each other. Certainly not because I can always count on seeing a scintillating game or even super individual performances.

No, I get tingly all over anticipating the intensity that is produced by the players knowing the outcome of the game will determine homefield advantage for the World Series. I know, too, that Commissioner Bud Selig gets tingly all over, too, because he created this magical connection.

Don’t you wish you had thought of …

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Consider this Part II of my observation that contrary to the way baseball used to be played when everything was decided on the field, too much is now often being decided off the field, in offices, where fans can’t watch.

In my previous column, I related how Major League Baseball (specifically Joe Torre) overturns rulings by official scorers, and the changes are kept secret to all but those who have to know, such as the teams involved in the plays and Elias Sports Bureau, MLB’s official statistician.

Scoring changes don’t alter the outcome of games. Changes made as the result of replays can and do.

According to MLB data, barely half of the challenged or reviewed plays have withstood reversal. Of the challenged calls, that means …

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If I had my choice, I would take baseball the way it used to be played, when everything was decided on the field. But they don’t ask me so I have to be content with accepting all of the decisions that are made in Major League Baseball offices instead of on Major League Baseball fields.

“You’re old school like I am,” Joe Torre said. “I understand your thinking.”

Torre, however, is a key person in an element of the game that has taken it off the field and dumped it in an office where Torre, the executive vice president for baseball operations, makes critical decisions. Those decisions, on the other hand, aren’t as critical and decisive as …

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