:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/16490919/173511858.0.jpg)
The stars are aligned. You might even say that it's been written in the stars a million miles away. Actually, no, you should never say that, and I should be banned from writing for typing it. Let's start over.
MLB's annual All-Star Game features five Orioles for the first time since 1997 and it is a game that Orioles fans can watch and imagine the home field advantage thing mattering for the first time since commissioner Bud Selig (who yesterday boasted that he's never sent an e-mail and never will) made that stupid rule in the first place. There were four Orioles on the team last year, but the Orioles were seven games out of first in the AL East, with a 45-40 record, and who could have imagined that second half?
Now we can imagine the Orioles being good because they've been good for more than a season and a half. They were in the playoffs last year, two ugly Jim Johnson outings away from winning the ALDS in four games. Imagining them making the playoffs again, if everything goes well, is not insane. They are 1.5 games out of the second wild card spot. There are no teams to leapfrog, other than Texas, who has that second wild card spot.
So we root for the American League team not just to see our guys do well, and not just because if the National League wins then we have to deal with fans of National League teams acting like they play real baseball, but because if it gets to the point where that matters, we want Games 6 and 7 of the World Series - to be played at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Which means Max Scherzer had better not make it two years in a row for a Tigers starter to melt down in the game.
I hear that Harvey guy, who went to the University of North Carolina, is pretty good. So's the American League lineup. So's the National League lineup. So's Scherzer.
Should be a good game, if we ever get to see or hear the game around all of the pre-packaged crap the Fox network inflicts upon us because they're chasing the eyeballs of the casual viewer who's never even heard of Trout. I mean, he wasn't even in the playoffs last year. He probably won't be in the playoffs this year either.