Baseball’s All-Star Game produced a pair of predictable developments, both of which you have read here before. You are excused from reading about them again should you choose to pass.

The game, not exactly a thriller, lived down to recent All-Star standards, drawing an all-time television ratings low despite the irresistible, magical link to homefield advantage for the World Series.

When he was commissioner, Bud Selig created the link, saying it would spur the players to play more intensely, making for a more exciting game. I don’t know about you, but I was not tingling with excitement Tuesday night during the American League’s 4-2 victory over the National League.

In fact, I might have nodded off once or twice. Maybe those were the innings when I missed the excitement.

From the looks of the Fox rating, though, it was very likely that Fox viewers nodded off all over the dial. Fox received a 6.4 overnight rating, a share that was …

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On the morning of July 14, 1976, two baseball reporters were having breakfast with Charlie Finley, the flamboyant owner of the Oakland Athletics, in the restaurant of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. It was the day after the All-Star Game and days before the hotel was discovered to be the source of the deadly Legionnaires Disease that killed 29 people.

The subject of the breakfast was supposed to be baseball, but Finley couldn’t stop talking about his new hairpiece. He was as proud of it as he was of his team’s three successive World Series championships earlier in the decade.

“Look at those two women,” he said, nodding at a nearby table. “They can’t stop looking over here.”

I looked at the table and said, “Sorry, Charlie. Those are our wives and they’re looking over here to see when we’re going to be finished.”

Finley’s hairpiece and Legionnaires Disease weren’t the only significant developments at the Bellevue-Stratford that week. The day before the game, July 12 – 40 years ago Tuesday – negotiators for the owners and the players reached agreement on the details of …

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One day last week the New York Yankees’ president, Randy Levine, acted uncharacteristically. He berated reporters who cover the team.

The subject was the Yankees’ position regarding the Aug. 1 trade deadline by which teams can trade players without first securing waivers on them. At this stage of the season, talk always arises about whether a team is a buyer or a seller. That is, has a team decided it is not a contender and will try to trade players or is a contender and will try to acquire players?

When Levine was asked that question at a news conference about a business development, he called it “nonsense.”

“When we decide to become sellers – if we decide to become sellers – or if we decide to become buyers, you’ll …

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