Improving the All-Star Game for Dummies

I love it when you call me Big Papi...

Here at Trot, we’re not huge baseball fans. And we’re not alone. In the past two decades, baseball attendance has fallen nearly 30% while TV ratings have taken a similar dive – viewership is down nearly 35%. It’s pretty easy to see why – scoring is down nearly 40% while the length of games have increased 17%. The All-Star Game, once the highlight of the regular season in baseball, has actually decreased in popularity faster than the actual sport itself. The All-Star Games (with normalized monetary values) have brought in about 6% less in revenue each year for the past fourteen years! These numbers are completely bogus, I pulled them out of my ass, but here are some ways I’d like to improve the All-Star Game.

Pitcher’s vs. Switch Hitting Home Run Derby – I’m tired of seeing dudes like Bobby Abreu swing effortlessly and knocking out like 20 dingers a round. Instead, I want to see if a pitcher can straight up hit as many homers as someone like A-Rod switch hitting. Oh dude, I totally set you up for a joke there with that “A-Rod switch hitting” comment.

Backwards Bat Home Run Derby – Man, that’d be awesome. Extreme accuracy plus the fact it’d totally fuck up a hitter’s swing mechanics. What’s not to like? It’d be great to see the batters adapt once they start swinging the smaller end of the bat and realizing their swing is twice as fast and half as powerful.

Fruit Smash – Instead of tossing baseballs to the big home run swingers, why not toss apples, oranges, and cantaloupe? Sure, there would be no winner or loser in this, it’d just be awesome to see Barry Bonds completely annihilate a small watermelon and cover everybody in juice. Then they’d all be like Bonds. Hoho. Cue rimshot!

Bench Press Competition – Sosa vs. McGwire vs. Bonds vs. Canseco. Look guys, we know you juice. It’s pretty obvious. But why not put the juice to good use? Everybody loves to see a freakish athletes lift weights that should not be humanly possible. I want to know which tainted athlete put his illegal advantage to best use. My prediction goes McGwire, Canseco, Bonds, then Sosa with McGwire tossing up 650.

Manliest Catcher – Big fucking deal. I can guard home plate and let a 130 pound Ichiro try to bowl me over. It can’t be that difficult. But how about we gather the ten baddest catchers and have them guard the plate while A.J. Hawk or Roy Williams runs full speed for thirty yards with the sole purpose of knocking the catcher THE FUCK OUT? Tell me you wouldn’t want to see that. Go ahead, I dare you.

Dumbest Baseball Player – Think about it. Nearly every basketball and football player goes to college for at least a year, but most baseball players haven’t stepped foot on a collegiate campus. Plus baseball players don’t have to stay mentally sharp by remembering plays and routes because THERE ARE NONE in baseball. So under this assumption, you gather the ten dumbest looking baseball players (here’s looking to you Randy Johnson) and convince them it’s a test to determine who’s the smartest. Once you grade the test, you flip the script and reward the player who is closest to functional retardation.

Hitter’s Revenge – You know how hitters totally think they have a home run but then an asshat like Gary Matthews or Tori Hunter runs up the wall and robs them? Well there’s this gameshow called “Most Extreme Elimination” where contestants have to choose a door and run through it. I believe two are made of paper with nothing behind them, while the third is completely solid behind it. So by average, one of every three contestants runs full steam into a wall that he believes will give way, but it doesn’t. We then apply that to the outfield walls during the All-Star game. Every other wall panel will be a breakaway panel and sometimes an outfielder will run back and jump off the wall to steal a homer, and sometimes a player will run back towards a wall and hilariously keep running through the wall. Actually, they should implement this full-time in baseball games.

--CH