As the provisions of baseball's new collective bargaining agreement trickled out Wednesday night, The Associated Press reported one of the most noteworthy changes: The All-Star Game will no longer decide home-field advantage in the World Series, and instead the pennant winner with the best record will host Games 1, 2, 6 and 7. After 14 years of "This Time It Counts," now it apparently does not.
The move was greeted almost uniformly with celebration. It had become silly, per conventional wisdom, to hand such a valuable reward based on a game treated by participants as a Grapefruit League contest.