Baseball loves to fall back on this notion that its All-Star Game is the finest in American professional sports, which it unquestionably is, even if that’s like being the best-smelling durian. The NBA All-Star Game embraces that it’s not a game with 48 minutes of back-and-forth dunking. The NFL’s Pro Bowl is so bad the league’s commissioner wanted to cancel it. Players regularly come down with mysterious injuries on the eve of the NHL All-Star Game in order to skip it.

At the same time, MLB’s All-Star Game is suffering from a bit of identity crisis in the wake of the full-team announcements Monday night that left one of its most recognizable players – one of the only players who embodies the star in All-Star – needing to win another round of fan voting simply to participate.

View photos Clayton Kershaw is 5-6 with a 3.08 ERA this season, but those numbers are deceiving. (AP) More

Clayton Kershaw is not some random jabroni. He is The Best Pitcher In The World, earning every one of those capital letters with a five-year run that stands with the best in the game’s history. And because his earned-run average happens to be a tick over 3.00 – because looking past that number and at the peripherals that say he has pitched every bit as well, if not better than, all of his past seasons except last year’s MVP-winning campaign seemed to be too difficult a task for those in charge – Kershaw is at the whim of a populace that fell about a half-million votes shy of electing Omar Infante to start the game.

The intent of the All-Star Game is simple: delight fans. And an All-Star Game without someone of Kershaw’s caliber, particularly when he’s in the midst of a perfectly excellent year by everyone else’s standards, would feel empty. There is a balance between choosing those in the midst of breakout seasons and those whose past achievements have earned them a ticket into the game because of who they are, not what they do.

Almost always this issue exists with pitchers. Fans vote on position players, and even as Derek Jeter stumbled toward the end of his career, they elected him to start the All-Star Game because he was Derek Freaking Jeter, and to the general public that wants to see the biggest names play in the Midsummer Classic, that matters.

By making the All-Star Game “count” – by taking an exhibition and assigning legitimate, tangible meaning to it because, heaven help us, that very exhibition had ended in a tie – Bud Selig ensured the purpose of the game would be bastardized in an effort by managers to win.

Simply look at the team American League manager Ned Yost picked on Monday. He chose Red Sox utilityman Brock Holt over Alex Rodriguez – the Alex Rodriguez who, like him or not, is an actual known quantity in a game that begs for those sorts – because Rodriguez is a DH, and a team with a backup infielder for every position apparently isn’t enough. Of Yost’s 13 pitchers, seven are relievers. And he picked those seven, skipping over Scott Kazmir and Yovani Gallardo and Corey Kluber and Clay Buchholz, because he wants to match up his bullpen and win the game. If that means bringing in Zach Britton for one batter, hey, we’re not here to celebrate baseball. And if that means the most boring, mind-numbing aspect of baseball infiltrating a game that’s supposed to be about selling it to the casual fans who don’t see most of the best players in the world on a daily basis, well, at least he’s doing it for home-field advantage in the World Series.

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