And now, the All-Star break

 So we've officially reached the All-Star break in our baseball spring/summer, and that means the All-Star Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game from Atlanta, and that also means the one thing baseball can still lord over the NFL and the NBA in 2025 America.

Baseball has the best All-Star Game. And it's not even close.

It's still a baseball game, see, and it's still the National League vs. the American League, and you can still sit out on your deck in the slow-cooling July twilight and listen to it on your radio, and pretend it's 1936. That was the year of the first baseball All-Star game, and the format hasn't changed a whole lot.

The NFL?

It doesn't even have an All-Star Game anymore, unless you count that backyard cookout it tries to pass off as one. 

The NBA?

Yeah, it still has an All-Star Game, if you can call it that. The Association went back to he East vs. the West in 2024, but before that it was Team LeBron vs. Team Giannis, or maybe Team Drake vs. Team Shakira. Also they don't really play basketball. In 2024, for instance, the final score was 211-186. It looked like that time Vladimir Putin scored eight goals in a hockey game because no one dared touch him.

Ah, but the baseball All-Star Game is still baseball. Pitchers pitch. Batters stand in. Players in the field actually try to make put-outs.

The only fly in the ointment is AL vs. NL doesn't have the cache it used to on account of all the wildly out-of-control interleague play. No one has to guess anymore how Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani will fare against, say, Paul Skenes or Tarik Skubal, because we've already seen it. Usually more than once.

At any rate, it's All-Star week, which traditionally has been viewed as the halfway point of the season. It's not, really -- game-and-calendar-wise, we're well past halfway -- but let's check out some highlights anyway, shall we?

* The cool-running Detroit Tigers (59-38) have the best record in baseball. They're the only team in the bigs playing .600 ball (.608), although the Los Angeles Dodgers, the best team in the National League, are at .598 and just one game behind the Olde English "D."

* The indescribably horrific Colorado Rockheads have the worst record in baseball. They're now 52 games under .500, 35 1/2 games out of first in the NL West, and a staggering 24 1/2 out of next to last.

* The Chicago Cubs still lead the NL Central, but Milwaukee has won seven straight and folks on the north side are starting to develop a nervous twitch. This will happen when you see your lead shrink to one game, and also when you're a Cubs fan and are thus conditioned to expect the worst.

* Best race in baseball right now? The Blob votes for the AL East. The Blue Jays, the Yankees and the Red Sox (who've won 10 straight) are all within three games of one another. I'm still betting the Yankees, but only if the Red Sox don't run the table the second half of the season. That would be a 74-0 finish for the Scarlet Hose -- which of course is impossible, but we all know how unrealistic hopes hrive in the Fens.

"Hey, what about your Cruds, Mr. Blob?" you're asking now.

Well, they're still the Cruds, naturally. Nineteen games under water, 18 1/2 out of first, 11 out of next-to-last. But a bright side beckons.

Thanks to the Rockheads and the Washington Nah-tionals, they're not the worst team in the league. They're not even the second worst team in the league.

Oh, the glory.