All-Star games should all stop

The best time to talk about All-Star games would be now. After all, the NHL All-Star Game and NFL Pro Bowl are this Sunday. The NBA All-Star Game is next Sunday. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball owners recently decided to award home-field advantage in the World Series to the team representing the league that won the All-Star Game, a vote subject to MLB Players' Association approval.\nTherefore, it would be a good time to get my thoughts on All-Star games off my chest.\nGet rid of them.\nAll-Star games serve no useful purpose, not now and not ever. People waste too much time trying to tweak them somehow when the proper solution would be to just end them. Each of the four major pro sports leagues finds ways to screw it up.\nNHL\nThey finally have gone back to an Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference format after a few years of the awful North America vs. the World format. That format made it an us-against-them game, and that only gave the xenophobes more ammunition. Why would a St. Louis Blues fan be conflicted about rooting for Chris Pronger, who's Canadian, playing for the North American team or Pavol Demitra, who's Slovakian, playing for the World team?\nWhile they have gone back to conference alignments, the bottom line is that you don't even have to be a hockey purist to know that there is more physical contact on a fashion runway in France than in the NHL All-Star Game, especially if Naomi Campbell is participating. So what is accomplished by playing it?\nNFL\nThe Pro Bowl resembles an actual NFL game the way a fur coat resembles a toejam. Do you remember who won last year's Pro Bowl? \nWhat's especially aggravating is that people will whine and argue for hours about those who deserved to get in and who didn't, yet they never watch the actual Pro Bowl. Fans, players and coaches each get a one-third vote, yet few fans and players can talk about who are the best offensive linemen or special teams players. In fact, it is impossible for a free safety to evaluate who the best left guards are because how often are they paying attention to the left guard (and vice versa)?\nNBA\nThis used to be a wonderful game in the mid-to-late '80s because all the players would try to outdo one another with great passes. Now they try to outdo one another with great shots. There's a big difference.\nIn the '80s, Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas and Larry Bird would really push the tempo, and one would wonder what might happen next. Then, the worst thing that ever happened to the All-Star Game showed up: Michael Jordan. Jordan insisted on hogging the ball and taking ridiculous off-balance shots that had little chance of going in. He passed on the torch, or should I say the lit fart, to Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant, who have also succeeded in taking the fun out of the game.\nBan it now before somebody says the most prominent NBA All-Star Game cliché: "pass the torch."\nMLB\nLast year's All-Star Game tie was not the travesty others made it out to be. After all, the game doesn't count.\nRelating winning the All-Star Game to home-field advantage in the World Series, though, is ridiculous because of the one-person-from-every-team rule. That means that somebody from the Detroit Tigers or Tampa Bay Devil Rays might impact who gets home-field advantage. Somebody who plays for one of these teams has as much business deciding who gets home field as Charles Manson or Michael Jackson's third nose.\nLast year, the game was a tie because both teams ran out of players. Managers have 30 players they try to get into the game, and many often feel an obligation to get the players who are the lone representative from their team in order to appease that team's fans.\nNow that we have interleague play to satisfy our National League vs. American League craving, why don't we end the All-Star Game and just give home-field advantage in the World Series to the team with the better record?\nEmphasizing team play over individual honors is a novel idea, huh?