What's bigger, the car or Jeanne Zelasko?
Nothing says “tribute” like asking a Hall of Fame broadcaster his thoughts on the most popular player in his franchise’s history and then letting him get out almost half of his answer before a very pregnant woman begins yelling at him. Ahh, you just can’t beat the classy way Fox broadcasts baseball, can you?

From the smug Joe Buck misidentifying the best player in the National League to Tim McCarver continuing to spray orange paint on his head to Kevin Kennedy asking completely unintelligible questions to Mark Buehrle, it just doesn’t get any better than Fox baseball.

The worst part, of course, is that the National League’s eighth straight loss (there was a tie in there someplace, too) will cost our Cubs the home field advantage in the World Series.

Yeah, I can’t even joke about that with a straight face.

It was a night of firsts. Derrek Lee and E-ramis Ramirez got their first All-Star hits. Mark Buehrle got his first All-Star win. David Eckstein became the first dwarf to ever start an All-Star Game, and Kenny Rogers became the first player to give up a home run that landed in another country. Somewhere in Ontario a moose got hit by the bomb Andruw Jones hit off the Gambler in the seventh.

Baseball’s All-Star Game is the best of its kind. But saying it’s better than a half-assed Pro Bowl, or a glorified pick-up game in the NBA or whatever that no-defense thing the NHL used to play, isn’t really saying much. It’s still an exhibition and…it’s still meaningless.

It’s not like the decision to have home field ride on the game is much different than the eeny-miney-moe every other year approach they used to use. It’s still leaving it up to chance. Plus, Americans watching America’s pasttime don’t care about the outcome of a game where the result will impact something happening three months from now, involving two yet to be determined teams.

Bud Selig can crow about how this is baseball’s “best season” because attendance is up. Well, of course attendance is up. You moved a franchise from a city where no fans showed up to a city starved for baseball. Even you couldn’t do anything stupid enough this year to make attendance go down.

Don’t make us feel guilty if we don’t care one way or another if Rogers showed up for the game anyway. All I know is he got a 20 game suspension with pay and a $50,000 fine and by showing up for the All-Star Game he gets a $50,000 contract bonus. Yeah, that’ll teach him.

Don’t obsess over how many innings players are going to play. Derrek and E-ramis both played six full innings. Some Cubs’ fans were no doubt fearful that one or both would get hurt. But the truth is, they’re far more likely to have gotten hurt on the drive to the airport than by actually playing in the game.

What I’ll be interested to see is how long the wheels stay on Dontrelle Willis this half. He looked awful in his Friday night start against the Cubs and just as bad in his one inning of batting practice work last night.

He’s a tremendous talent, but if you think Prior and Zambrano have been ridden hard at a young age by Dusty Baker…Lance Armstrong’s bike seat has less wear on it than Dontrelle’s arm. I’m not saying. I’m just saying.

One thing you can say about the All-Star Game telecast, as long as Chris Berman is allowed to sweat his way through the Home Run Derby the night before, Buck and McCarver will always look like Huntley and Brinkley by comparison.

What a sad, sad, fat, sad man Chris Berman is. His act is so tired and thin that you could read a novel through it. But he either doesn’t care, or more likely, doesn’t realize that what once was mildly amusing and sometimes clever is now so hackneyed that you can actually hear people cringe when he does it.

His general bufoonery has reached a level where you watch him turn bright red and sweat like Roberto Novoa in a spelling bee and you hope for his sake, and ours, that a blood vessel in his head succumbs to the pressure.

Berman’s “act” is Terry Shiavo and the feeding tube is long overdue for a yank.

In Chicago, for years we took the All-Star Break for what it really was. The end of the season and the beginning of Bears’ training camp. But this year the White Sox would have to pull a collapse of Cubs in ’69 proportions to miss the playoffs and the Cubs are stuck in the wake of a very half-assed wild card race in the NL, one in which they are not currently good enough to win, and not currently bad enough to completely fall out of.

So whether you’re ready for it or not, there’s still important baseball to be played on both sides of town. Judging by the way the Cubs have somnambulically staggered through the season and the way the Sox are due for a reality check, it could be poorly played important baseball. But we’ll take what we can get.

What will be interesting, at least for the next 18 days will be what the Cubs and Sox do to improve their chances.

If you’re Kenny Williams (and if you are, the sheriff’s department wants me to remind you that it’s time to replace the batteries in the ankle bracelets of your kids) you’re not interested in making a move to improve your playoff chances. You’re trying to make a move to put the Sox in a position to win the World Series. As currently made up, the Sox have no chance. OK, they have some chance because anybody in the playoffs has a chance, but you know what I mean.

They have one thing that every champion needs, a stud starting pitcher. They have Mark Buehrle, but then they have Jon Garland who will someday have his picture next to Jack Armstrong in an article about “guys who had great first halves and then disappeared after the All-Star Game.”

That’s an exaggeration, but the Sox need a second dominant starter. Freddy Garcia and Jon Garland can help pitch you to the playoffs, but…

And offensively, the Sox are surprisingly weak at a number of areas for a team with the record they have. They’re not exactly getting stellar production out of third base, shortstop or catcher. Hey, AJ Eyechart’s a huge upgrade over Miguel Olivo, Ben Davis and Jamie Burke, but he’s hitting .250 doesn’t get on base and will be lucky to drive in 60 runs.

The Sox strength hasn’t been their offense. It’s been solid starting pitching every night and a good bullpen. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bother to make a dramatic move to improve the offense. In the playoffs, great offenses become good, good offenses become average and average offenses go home early. Other teams won’t use as many pitchers against you. Bullpens get shortened, starting rotations get shortened. It’s how the Red Sox could win a World Series with a five man pitching staff last year. Their starting outfielders have combined to score six more runs than the Cubs’ outfielders have. And nobody’s getting ticker tape ready for a parade for the Cubs’ bunch.

The Cubs? Oh, they wish they had the Sox problems. Instead, they start the season very near the bottom of a big dogpile of teams trying to decided if they’re in it or not. Because the Cubs had to underachieve a great deal to get where they are, they should be, by definition in it. It’ll be hard for them to play as poorly in the second half as they did in the first half. However, one thing we know, they’re up for the challenge.

While the Cubs have the starting pitching to be dangerous in the postseason, they have one guy in the bullpen they can rely on, and he’s only been doing his job for about six weeks. That’s not exactly a recipe for success.

Strangely, they may have solved their biggest offensive weakness by not making a trade. Demoting Corey Patterson gives Dusty Baker a centerfield position he can’t be comfortable with. He either plays a guy he obviously loathes, Jerry Hairston, or he plays a rookie, and that makes him queasy, too. Or, he could split the baby in half and start Jose Macias, and lose his job. I guess that’s how we’ll know that Dusty is actively trying to get fired.

The Cubs’ offense hasn’t been “fixed” by moving Hairston and Walker into the first two spots, but it certainly gives them more of a fighting chance than they’ve had. The benefits of having two guys with a good chance of being on base when Derrek Lee bats can’t be completely nullified by Jerry’s outfield defense. Right?

What will be interesting to see though is what each GM does to address his teams’ problems. Kenny’s going to make a big move. I’m sure he fights the urge every day to trade for Roberto Alomar again, but he’s going to go after a starting pitcher he thinks can help the Sox right now. Even if it’s AJ Burnett of the Marlins who for all his talent is 42-43 in his career and has a cot set up in the DL room.

But if you’re Jim Hendry, what do you do? You’re waiting for Nomar…again, so you’re not going to trade for a shortstop, though convincing your manager to play Ronny Cedeno in the meantime would be nice. So the places you have ripe for an upgrade are the outfield and the bullpen.

Thankfully, it now appears that the Washington Nationals are officially going to take Preston Wilson out of the equation. If you could find a park that Preston is less suited for than RFK, I’d like you to tell me.

So that’s where we are. Both Chicago teams have ambitious, relentless general managers who are going to do “someting.” We just don’t know what either something is yet. But they have less than 18 days to fill us in.