A W for gimmickry

 The Blob is usually death on goofy made-up junk that defiles our games -- don't even get me started on that dropping-a-baserunner-out-of-the-sky-in-extras business -- but I've gotta say, I didn't mind the gimmickry in baseball's All-Star Game last night. Perhaps my ancient hardening arteries have made me soft in the head.

Or perhaps it was because the gimmickry happened in an All-Star game, which of course is gimmickry itself if you think about it.

So, yeah, I'll forgive the guardians of what was once our national game for deciding the Midsummer Classic with a hockey shootout. In the baseball version, they went to Home Run Derby swing-off after the game was tied 6-6 at the end of nine innings. Kyle Schwarber of the Phillies parked three in the seats to win it for the National League, which blew a 6-0 lead after six innings and thus hardly deserved such a kindly fate.

Schwarber's three bombs gave the NL a 4-3 edge in the swing-off, and won him the game's MVP award. It was only the senior circuit's second All-Star Game win in the last 12 years. 

And, again, I was OK with that. And not just because, as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, I'm an NL guy.

I was OK with it because baseball's All-Star Game achieves what none of the others manage these days, which is mix actual competition with straight-up joyous fun. And it's the fun part that makes baseball, baseball. It's why, for 100 years or more, kids have slung their mitts over the handlebars of their bikes every summer and headed off to the nearest scruffy dirt-and-grass patch of ground.

And even when they grow up to become, say, Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, part of that kid stays with them.

So when you go to a Home Run Derby to decide things, it's only the lineal descendant of declaring any hit to right field an out when you can't scare up nine players a side. And, chatter being an integral part of the game when you're a kid, the best part of last night's festivities by the Blob's lights was another gimmick: Miking up selected players so the broadcast crew could talk to them while they were playing the game.

And so we got 37-year-old Dodgers legend Clayton Kershaw calling out his pitches during his auld-lang-syne star turn in the second inning, and the Cubs' Pete Crow-Armstrong yakking away while he played center field. And then there was A's rookie Jacob Wilson, somehow playing shortstop for the Americans while simultaneously engaging in a three-way gab with John Smoltz in the booth and Wilson's dad, Jack, who played shortstop in the All-Star Game as a Pirate 21 years ago.

Weird stuff, all of that. But also awesome stuff.

And perfect for baseball's All-Star Game -- which, after all, is supposed to be a celebration of both the game and the generational ties that make it what it is.

Well done, baseball. Well done indeed.