Bless the All-Star Game

I have only one request to make of my colleagues currently preparing to pretend Major League Baseball's All-Star Game, and the glorified carnival midway leading up to Tuesday's event, actually matters to anyone except whomever it is each participant has hired to keep track of his incentive bonuses.

Please, all of you, don't tell me that it's really hot where you are.

MLB put this year's game in Kansas City, the poster franchise for revenue sharing. Once upon a time, back when there was a reserve clause, the New York Yankees used to loot the Kansas City Athletics so badly that the Midwest team could never compete. Then along came free agency, and along came the Royals to replace the Athletics, who ran off to Oakland and won a bunch of championships despite being owned by a crazy person. (This was generally something of a recurring theme in MLB during the 1970s.) In 1985, the Royals actually won a World Series. Then, of course, we went through collusion, and the canceled 1994 Series, and eventually the Royals slipped to the bottom of the standings, whence they spent an awful lot of time griping about the unfairness of it all despite the fact that they were owned by David Glass, a Walmart gombeen who looked out his window and saw a universe of people who should be working for minimum wage.

(To the surprise of absolutely nobody, during baseball's extended labor conflict of 1994 Glass was one of the people pushing hardest for the use of scab ballplayers.)

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