MLB: All-Star Game: Beautiful new baseball world

The American League won the 89th All-Star Game of MLB with 8:6 in the tenth inning against the National League after a crazy final phase. Numerous home runs were almost exclusively the source of the run production. In general, this year’s Midsummer Classic clearly reflected the development of baseball in recent times – both positive and negative.

High tension until the end, many home runs, even more strikeouts, in addition numerous partly very entertaining interviews with wired players on the court during the game. Everyone involved once again ensured a perfect show in the MLB All-Star Game.

If you take a closer look, there were ten home runs in the game, a new all-star record. Of the 14 runs of both teams, 13 were completed via Long Ball. Only the 8:5 run for the AL by Jean Segura was the result of a Sacrifice Fly by Michael Brantley.

On the other hand, there were 25 strikeouts on the note. For both teams in total. These ten home runs were joined by a double, which resulted in more extra base hits (11) than singles (9). In addition, there were nine walks and a hit-by-pitch. Steal tests are not included.

So the whole game was a pretty stationary event. Only whoever hit the ball out scored runs and actually everyone had to hop or top. Either you hit the ball hard and far or you don’t hit it at all and you are spotted directly at the plate.

If you want to break it down rudimentarily, this all-star game was all about the much quoted “3 True Outcomes”, i.e. home run, walk or strikeout. There was essentially nothing in between.

Now you shouldn’t expect too much from an all-star game. There are no real strategic guidelines and everyone should do their own thing. Sometimes it happens that every player tries to shine for himself and does not necessarily have the best for the team in mind. Manny Machado, for example, announced before the game that he would consistently swing towards the fence, so try to hit a home run.

An approach he does not adopt in everyday life. But it’s a friendly game. Machado is one of the best players in the league, but less good people also play in competitive games with this goal in mind. The result are tendencies, which were shown on Tuesday evening under the magnifying glass of the broad mass.

Even in normal play, the trend is clearly towards hardly beating singles any more. You want extra base hits and you also accept strikeouts. That’s how the Astros have recently won the World Series – through strong pitching with many strikeouts and ultra-aggressive offensives trying to force mistakes.

It is therefore basically not wrong, because it is successful, but there is also the danger of alienating the game too much. You don’t want to hit any more balls on the ground, because that leads to double plays with runners on base. But the productive out also disappears, for example when a runner stands on two and passes through a ground ball to the right to the third base. If you hit a routine fly ball instead, the runner stays where he is.

For baseball purists, this becomes a nightmare, since nothing happens in the game – a common prejudice, by the way, that you hear regularly when you talk to laymen about baseball. With the clear trend to really only follow these three outcomes, the flow of play – a difficult concept in baseball anyway – is stagnating even more seriously than usual.

What turned into fireworks at the end could just as well have been a flop on Tuesday, if the less good pitchers on both sides hadn’t ripped open the doors wide towards the end.

On the one hand, the famous motto: “Chicks dig the Long Ball.” But what does the masses say, when it becomes the norm on a broad scale, that all that remains to be felt are home runs for the run production?

The All-Star Game is just a friendly game in which the show is in the foreground and much of the game resembles an anomaly. At the same time, however, the 89th edition reproduced an image that maximized the modern and not necessarily entirely positive tendencies of the game. The question for the future is whether this wheel can – or wants to – be turned back.

This article was published without previous view by the Major League Baseball.