I got home from the water park, and had dinner with MK Tuesday night. We got back in time to see the last part of the All-Star game, from the sixth inning on.

Baseball is just about the last professional sport in which I've managed to maintain any interest whatsoever. I'm not a huge fan, but I do go to a game every now and then, and generally will turn on the radio here in the office while I'm sitting in front of the PC working on something. So, I was enjoying a hard-fought game, where it seemed that the players were truly going all out- there were some great defensive plays. My man Lance Berkman had a good showing.

And then the commissioner calls it quits in the eleventh inning, ostensibly because one of the pitchers, a starter, mind you, said his arm was too worn out to go on, after pitching a whopping two innings. There were no pitchers left on either roster.

I haven't been left this high and dry since I was, well, doing the Deed of Darkness for the very first time, with a girl I'd been desiring a very long time. The feeling was mutual - it was simply a matter of finding time and opportunity - she lived in another city. Just as things were reaching the climactic moment, the door bursts open, and a person who was a Most Unwelcome Sight rolled in. Another long story for another time.

Anyway, I'm aggravated. Mostly at the players, to tell you the truth, after listening to them all comment on the stoppage as a Good Thing, we can't get hurt, blah-blah-blah. But also at the managers, who have caved in to this "everybody has to play" pressure, and Selig, who had any number of options other than ending the game.

He could have told the managers that they had to find a position player to take the mound, and put the poor old tired pitcher out in right field. He could have allowed them to put position players back in the game - an already existing special All-Star Game rule allows a catcher to come back if needed due to injury. (This may have been tough, though, as by all accounts most of the starters, the Sosas and the Bonds, had already left the stadium, not caring even as much as the fans did to see the outcome of the game) One of the managers even suggested a Home Run Derby to decide it.

The way it was handled made perfectly clear the hierarchy of concerns the game has - tied and battling it out for supremacy are the owners and the players, while the fans that make it all possible are sucking the very Hindest of Hind Tits.

But that's OK. It's only baseball, just a game. It's not nearly as worth getting worked up about as the things that really matter in our personal and public lives - how we balance the demands of work and family, how we deal with the menace of terrorism, how we walk the fine line between civil liberties and law enforcement, how we gracefully integrate ever more powerful technological innovations into our culture, manage our planetary natural resources, and continue the march of human culture from ignorance and repression to knowledge and freedom.

Sure, baseball and other professionally played spectator sports fill a real need in the human psyche - we monkey people have to have some leisure in our lives. But those needs can be filled in many other ways.

So, when and if there is a stoppage of play this season, as seem ever more likely, we should recall this. Baseball, as much as we may like it, is just not important. Let the millionaires on the field and the millionaires that own the teams fight like the Kilkenny cats until every last dreg of life left in the sport has been drained away. Let them fight in a vacuum of public opinion and attention - one that mirrors the total lack of concern that they have shown for the fans of the sport.

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