Mid-summer MIAs

 The MLB All-Star Game is Tuesday night, and the Blob has an odd little ritual for the occasion. Every year, or almost every year, it takes a radio and a cold adult beverage out to the deck, and listens to the first few innings as the midsummer twilight lollygags toward night.

Call it an homage to baseball's historic place as a game uniquely suited to radio, or a fit of nostalgia, or just a weird old guy thing. But it's like stepping into a cool little rip in time and returning to kidhood or something like it, when boys were proper little goofballs, a vacant lot was Yankee Stadium and baseball cards were routinely sacrificed to the bicycle gods so you could sound like Mario Andretti when you pedaled down the street.

And, yeah, food and sports and presidents were better then, and kids obeyed their parents, and, you know, America and all that. The endless refrain of the old, signing up for another hitch.

But you know what?

Some things were better, dammit.

Like, Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and Mickey Mantle 'n' them actually showed up for the All-Star Game, for instance.

Today, well, today a man's gotta do what a man's gotta, which is protect the merchandise. Which is to say, himself.

And so come Tuesday, the best pitcher in baseball this summer will not be on the bump for the National League. And two All-Stars from the Houston Asterisk-os will not be in the American League dugout.

Jacob DeGrom of the Mets says he's opting out of the All-Star game to rest up for the second half of the season and (here it comes!) Spend Some Time With His Family. And Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve aren't gonna play, either.

Altuve's begging off because his leg's kinda bothering him. Correa's bugging out because his wife is pregnant, though not imminent.

I may be wrong about this, but I imagine Mays or Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams weren't always in tip-top condition when the Midsummer Classic came around. And I imagine there were plenty of All-Stars back in the day whose wives were with child at the same time.

Somehow they always managed to show up. And if you go far enough back in the day, it was for two All-Star games, not just one.

And maybe that's because our priorities were wackier then, which is a fair point. Back in the day, guys didn't play hurt, they played injured, an admirable if profoundly stupid circumstance. And guys whose wives were pregnant?

Well, it was up to Mom to soldier through pregnancy pretty much alone, because the social order of the time required Dad to be elsewhere. The perpetrator of the situation, so to speak, got to do his own version of the perp walk, because by God he had a job, and the job was Job One.

That's the way things were. Ah, the days of Neanderthal un-enlightenment.

And yet ...

And yet, the All-Star Game, ostensibly, is the Fan's Game. That's how MLB has always sold it, at least since it started letting the fans pick the teams.

So when the fans vote DeGrom or Altuve or Correa onto the All-Star team, they sort of have an obligation to show up. Either that, or they should instruct MLB to take their names off the ballot.

If they don't, and they're designated All-Stars, and they neglect to show up for reasons other than legitimate injury, then MLB's obligation to the Fan's Game is to declare them ineligible for the All-Star Game the next year -- no matter what kind of season they're having.

So it says here, anyway.