When I told my Dad that the 2003 baseball All-Star Game will be played in Chicago, he immediately went to work trying to help baseball come up with a way to save face after the Milwaukee fiasco last week. He let me post his open letter to Bud and other baseball notables.

The thrust of the letter is that since Milwaukee's just a short ride up the road from Chicago, they can finish this year's ASG, giving the cheated fans in Milwaukee a chance to get their money's worth from the Game (if not from years of chronic Brewer ineptitude).

Needless to say, I like the idea. I'll take it a step further (and sillier) and suggest that baseball hold a charity event at Mars Cheese Castle outside of Kenosha. The fact is, nothing MLB does can make the All-Star Game look any more ridiculous than they did last Tuesday.

Here's the letter my dad wrote:

July 11, 2002

Open Letter to:
Bud Selig, Commissioner of Baseball
Bob Costas, NBC Sports
George Will, ABC News
Editor, Sports Illustrated
Joe Buck, Fox Sports
Tim McCarver, Fox Sports
Editor, The Sporting News
Tom Werner, Owner, Boston Red Sox
Bill Simmons, ESPN Sports Guy
Jackie MacMullan, The Boston Globe
John Henry, Owner, Boston Red Sox

Dear Baseball Official/Reporter,

As a baseball fan of many years I have become very disenchanted with the current state of the game and was absolutely appalled to see the way that this year’s All-Star game ended.

Nevertheless, I have a proposed solution to the problem that would help baseball restore face and right the wrong that was done to fans everywhere in general, and Milwaukee in particular. It is a simple solution based on a unique opportunity given the geographical location of next year’s All-Star Game. Here is the solution, with various points to justify it. The solution can obviously be tweaked as necessary to accommodate what baseball officials deem appropriate:

• Since, as I understand it, next year’s game is at Comiskey Park in Chicago, hold the normal All-Star Festivities on Monday and Tuesday. Travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday (since it is only ~90 miles away) and resume and finalize this year’s game on Thursday night in Milwaukee. Resume the regular season on Saturday.

• Use the same roster for next year’s game and the remainder of this year’s. In other words, don’t bring back this year’s team to finish this year’s game but use next year’s players who will already be in Chicago and won’t have any more travel than that additional 90 miles. If new players are added who weren’t here this year, so be it; as long as it is still the AL vs. the NL and this game reaches a conclusion, fans will accept that.

• Perhaps consider making the Milwaukee continuation be for at least 3 innings, so that it would last for at least an hour and not just have the possibility of 4 batters and the game ending on a leadoff homer in the bottom of the 12th. It would also help win back the fans who were so disgusted on Tuesday.

• Have the players who finish the Chicago game start the resumed game in Milwaukee. This will lead to interesting managerial moves, that will also increase fan interest - a manager for example may want to keep Sammy Sosa or Ken Griffey Jr. in the Chicago game until the end so that they can be in at the start of the Milwaukee game as well. In the long run, the fans would rather see (a) Sosa bat 4 times in a game than (b) have him bat twice and his eplacement bat twice anyway, so this will work to the fans’ advantage as well.

• The managers will also have to arrange their pitching staffs to accommodate the innings on Thursday. If, for example, the same starting pitchers were to start the Chicago game next year, Curt Schilling and Derek Lowe, perhaps the managers would keep back Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine for Thursday’s Milwaukee game, or Barry Zito and Randy Johnson. In any case, again, it makes for more managerial strategy and therefore more fan interest and discussion of the game strategy.

• Let the fans who have ticket stubs from this year’s game in for free to next year’s game. Baseball owes it to them.

• Have the players greet the fans as they come into the park up to an hour before game time. No autographs would be allowed, but maybe there are giveaways for each fan – a picture of the two teams perhaps, or even a pen – just handed to them by the All-Stars themselves as they enter the park. As an NBA season-ticket holder for many years (and, for whatever it’s worth, my first sports love was baseball and I would have been interested in being a season ticket holder for baseball if it were not for being turned off by the state of the game for the last 15 years), I have gone to games where the players greet the fans at the turnstiles before a game and see no reason why baseball should not do that for this one game to win back public support.

• In next year’s game and in games from then on, do NOT make it a goal to get every player into the game. Again, the fans would rather see Barry Bonds play all 9 innings and get 4 turns at the plate than have someone else get 2 and Bonds only 2, so let them have that. Years ago, many players played the whole game and some did not get in. That’s OK. It’s the fans’ game. When I was growing up I would keep score in All-Star games and still have the scoresheets from those games (again my first love was baseball until baseball started losing its level of competition and made itself less interesting). I have the scoresheet for a 15 inning game in 1967 in which the AL used only 5 pitchers and 10 players played all 15 innings. As it turned out, my favorite player, Jim Lonborg, who went on to win the Cy Young Award that year, did not play, but it did not bother me – I saw a great game, with players like Hank Aaron and Brooks Robinson playing the whole game, and that was fine. The fans want (a) to see a good game, (b) have a chance to see the great players play, and (c) have there be a winner, so, again, please give that to them. If the goal switches from playing everyone, then if the game DOES go into extra innings there will be players – and, most importantly, pitchers, available, so Tuesday night’s travesty would not be repeated.

• If I am wrong about next year’s game being in Chicago, I would still advocate doing this second outing in Milwaukee. It would just mean that the travel is more complicated than a 90 mile trip.

Please consider this idea, or some variation thereof, as a way of righting the wrong that was done on Tuesday night.

After that, let’s solve the bigger problem - getting more real competition in baseball so that the best players don’t always go to the richest teams and so that the post-season appearances do not seem pre-ordained.