Thoughts on the 2026 All-Star Game and what it says about where baseball is at

Wednesday 7/15/26

Saw a decent amount of the All-Star Game last night in between other things I was doing (listening to the Grateful Dead's 10/23/72 Milwaukee performance, watching a documentary on H.P. Lovecraft). It was a tough watch and listen. My interest for a while was in whether the National League would be no hit, which I thought was definitely on the table.

Baseball has a strike out problem. It's a huge problem in my estimation. The strike out problem is made worse by baseball having a pitching problem, which sounds like an oxymoron, I know. What I mean, though, is that pitchers are like relievers. They know they're only going to be in there for so long. They rear back and throw every pitch as if it's to be their last on this earth. It's throwing, not pitching. Tank emptying. They know they're not going to be on the mound for the long haul.

Too little happens. When the ball is put in play, it's a lot of weak contact, jam shots. This would be different if the hitters weren't trying to hit everything 450 feet. Their plan is to run into one. That's not much of a plan. But no one has much of a plan. Baseball is so much better when everyone has a good plan and one good plan is pitted against another.

Then there was the broadcast. It's all social media now. Even non-social media is social media. The way we talk, gush, cozy up to, without sincerity, depth, nuance, insight. Gushy gushy coo. A coating of this slick film of glibness. (A slick film of glibness--a useful descriptive phrase for that which defines/marks most things in our society.)

If I was a kid, I'd have a hard time falling in love with this game (or anything in this society that one automatically encounters; that is, without going looking for other things buried away rather than presented daily). Baseball intoxicated me as a boy. As good baseball still does now, or would, if my life wasn't what my life is. Which is to say, it could again if I wasn't in the situation I'm in and could enjoy things, or anything. But that would be in the games and recordings and literature of the past, I'm afraid, and far less so in the current game.

You don't want to make too much about a single exhibition game, but that doesn't mean you can't see aspects even there of what's truly what. To be fair, the baseball All-Star Game is the only all-star game of the four major North American sports--football doesn't even have one anymore--that you can watch at this point, but that doesn't strike me as worth a whole lot in and of itself and is more of a win-by-default metric. I'd argue that if you like and know hockey and basketball then you know not to even bother trying to watch those two games for a second.

The National League scratched out three hits. As I watch something like this, I imagine other announcers on the call and how much different that would sound. It'd feel far less glossy. More sincere, less click bait-y. That's the tone, I'd say. The rapping of a hollow, shiny box. Much like how everything in our society is now presented. The homilies about magic and wonder from the likes of a John Smoltz as directed to hammer away at by the network...they're just so contrived. There isn't a lot of romanticism to baseball right now, nor anything else. Romanticism can be good. It needn't be predicated on naivete. It's definitely good for baseball. It can only be organic, though, or else it's just chintzy, which is to say, something else, that kind of glossy contrivance.

It was better to have the players wearing the uniforms of their teams, though, but even there, you get that monochromatic aspect of our world. Look at an All-Star Game from the 1970s and there's just so much contrast. In uniforms, styles, stances, wind-ups. A team game of individuals. That's how baseball should be and when baseball is best, the same as society, culture, the world, life.