Exes, All-Stars, and Home-Field Advantage

A friend sent me a link to this rant about all-star voting in baseball. This blogger wants to show how dumb it is to leave the voting up to fans by campaigning to have two clearly unqualified/unglamorous players elected to the team.

My only problem with this is the reasoning that's emphasized:

I understand that it's supposed to be an exhibition game for the fans, so why not let the fans decide who participates. It makes sense. But when The Commish made the insane decision to actually base home field advantage for the World Series on the outcome, the term exhibition became a misnomer.

Now we have fans, many of whom that know very little about the game of baseball, deciding which players will compete for their respective league to claim the right to home field advantage in the most important series of the season. In my opinion this is a travesty.

I've seen this complaint before, but it ignores the fact that, before the Commish made this "insane decision," the home-field advantage for the World Series was determined by...alternating between the American and National League every other season. So, if it was a National League year, but the American League representative had 20 more wins, too bad, the NL got home field. So it's not like the All-Star Game plan replaced a brilliant set-up. In fact, a monkey throwing darts would have been equally meritocratic.

(In his e-mail, my friend also asked me whether I still keep up a practice I started in college of giving a write-in vote to a certain girlfriend of mine as an outfielder in the National League. Alas, I haven't done that in many moons, but it was fun. I always imagined there had to be an official record of all votes kept somewhere, and it amused me to think of her name rounding out the list each year.)