Our feed was definitely better. Have you heard the people complaining about Fox's horrible coverage of Obama's first pitch? Apparently they used a close-shot so you couldn't tell whether the pitch made it to Pujols or whatever.  I read this and my reaction was, "What? I saw the whole thing..."

Those of us a little longer in the tooth will recall when all-star games were huge events, back when baseball games were rarely televised and your only exposure to a certain league's players -- AL players in my case as I was living in Montreal -- was during this game. In the 1970's, I had my family schedule our yearly camping trips around the game. One year they did not comply and I missed it. I was not pleased.

Nowadays, I could care less about the game. Part is just just due to the transition to adulthood. Part is due to the easily available 24/7 baseball access which removes a great deal of the mystique about the more infrequently seen players.

My all-star game alternative was an evening spent with the very underrated Bryan Cranston and season 2 of Breaking Bad.

The last 13 years certainly ARE a fluke. It's a statistical improbability when 2 teams with comparable talent have such an odd win distribution.

I think that was the point.  The two teams do not have comparable talent.

And Blair said Obama was booed by a substantial part of the crowd, while an appearance of Bush on a screen eveoked cheers

I think this had something to do with the White Sox jacket he was wearing...  That said, I thought the AS game was a clunker and I wish they would stop holding it. 

I used to be a major baseball fan (and fairly good player) but have almost completely drifted away from the game, I think there are some quite serious structural problems with the sport at both the professional and grassroots level.  Perhaps I would feel a little better if the Blue Jays could make a serious, long-term run at the playoffs. 

But we also know that the outcome of 1 run games is mostly based off luck (or if you'd prefer a more statistically proper term, random chance), and the AL has won 5 of the last 7 games by 1 run. If the NL wins 3 out of those 5, that binominal probability of the AL winning 9/12 becomes much more feasible. Sure, it is still improbable but more believable. Luck plays a role, and when the talent level is that great and the gap that small, luck plays a larger role than one would normally expect, especially in this extremely small sample.

And I think that's the key, that this is a really small sample. I mean, we are talking about baseball, where normally they play 162 games to try and smooth out those improbable streaks in an attempt to allow us to arrive at the probable conclusions.