Game counts, but will fans care?

CHICAGO -- Noble experiment or desperate act, the elevation of baseball's All-Star game from an exalted exhibition to a one-game playoff for World Series home field advantage already is a winner by some measures.

At least it's getting people to talk about the game and wiping out the bad taste of last year's debacle when it ended in a tie.

To commissioner Bud Selig and the ratings chasers at Fox Sports, the change gives Tuesday night's game meaning and encourages players, coaches and fans to take it seriously. As the Fox ads say with maddening repetition, "This time it counts."

To baseball purists, it's a cheap grab for viewers in a meaningless game that's supposed to be about fun and pride, at the cost of fairness in the sport's premier event, the World Series.

Instead of American League and National League teams alternating home- field advantage each October, as they have for a century, now the team from the league that wins the All-Star game will host four of the seven games in the fall classic.

The change, a hard sell among the players in spring training, is the start of a two-year trial. If it sticks and one league happens to go on a long run of All-Star game wins -- as has happened in the past -- teams from that league could have a decade or two of annual advantage in the World Series.

The shifting balance between the leagues' stars has produced prolonged periods of dominance: The NL won 21 of 23 All-Star games from 1963-85; the AL won 11 of the 14 prior to last year's tie.

Teams hosting games 1, 2, 6 and 7 of the World Series have won 15 of the last 17 titles -- and the last eight seven-game series.

Put those trends together, and the result could be imbalance in the sport for years to come.

"I don't like this so-called solution at all," Hall of Famer Joe Morgan said. "Home-field advantage in the World Series is too significant to attach to a midseason game played by guys from every team, most of whom won't be playing in October."

Toronto first baseman Carlos Delgado called the change "a production thing" that doesn't make sense.

"One thing has nothing to do with the other," he said.

Selig and Fox Sports executives reacted -- or overreacted, depending on one's point of view -- to last year's miserable ratings and criticism about the 7-7 tie, which was called by Selig after 11 innings when the managers had used up all their pitchers. But Selig and Fox also were looking at the larger picture of dwindling interest in the All-Star game over the past decade and lower ratings at the end of games.

In part, that was related to efforts by managers to get all the players in the game. By the end of the game in recent years, many starters -- after playing two or three innings -- already were on their private jets, heading home. A sense set in that neither the players nor the managers cared who won, so why should the fans?

Tim McCarver, the Fox commentator, recalled that when he went to his first All-Star game in 1966, Brooks Robinson played the whole game.

"I remember in the late '60s, Warren Giles, then the National League president, used to come in before the game and give us a talk on how important it was," McCarver said.

"Now you will see guys playing deeper into the game."

NL manager Dusty Baker takes issue with the perception that players haven't been playing hard. Personal pride, if not league pride, he believes, is still a strong motivating force.

"These guys wouldn't be All-Stars if they didn't play hard," Baker said.

Lou Piniella, for one, supports the change.

"I like the idea of the game having more significance," the Tampa Bay manager said. "Home field advantage is a big plus."

Fox Sports executive producer Ed Goren, who pushed for the change, predicted a 10 percent rise in the ratings from last year, if the game is competitive.

That's probably a fair expectation, said media consultant and former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson, a proponent of the change.

"There's a world of difference between an exhibition game that nobody cares about and one that means something," he said. "I don't see any damaging impact on baseball. It's a way of revitalizing the midsummer classic to the way it was years ago when it meant something. It's a noble experiment and I think it will work."

Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press