I hate pretense. It's something that almost ruins NCAA athletics for me. Everybody carries on like Division I athletes are amateurs, that everyone follows an archaic recruiting guidebook, that no one cheats or slips people a little money here and there. None of it's true, of course, and it's people that argue for the NCAA in comparison to, say, the NBA, that spout that convenient and annoying tripe. At least in the NBA, there is no pretense of amateurism. People are paid what the market (either rightly or wrongly) values them, something the NCAA will never do for its thousands of revenue-generating athletes. Which is all a long way of saying: I hate pretense. The same issues infect the MLB All-Star Game, making it an almost painful experience sometimes. I love the idea of the game: these are the world's best baseball players (or most of them, anyway) competing on one field one time a year. There's something special about that.
What's not special is that Major League Baseball and Bud Selig, embarrassed by the tie-game debacle in 2002, have suddenly contrived "meaning" for the game -- the league that wins gets home-field advantage for the World Series. This is supposed to make players care about playing, but has the net effect of making me care far less about the actual game.
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