We Could Live With a Home Run-Off.

Hey, it beats 'ghost runner on 2nd'

It’s Friday! You made it. Well done you.

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There were a few excited murmurs, though perhaps not more than a few, after the MLB All-Star Game this week debuted an extra-innings Home Run Phantasmagoria!* rule that most of the guys in both dugouts didn’t know existed.

True story: In the ninth inning on Tuesday, the game tied 6-6 and apparently headed for the 10th, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was guiding the National League team, sort of casually turned around in the dugout and said to his players, “You won’t believe this.”

A couple of minutes later, Robbie Ray, the Giants’ pitcher, observed some game-day staff headed toward the pitcher’s mound area, lugging an L-screen. Ray and teammate Logan Webb then glanced out at the National League bullpen: no one warming up.

“We were like, ‘What is going on right now?’” Ray said.

Webb: “I honestly had no clue this was a thing.”

That makes several million of us. But it all worked out, didn’t it? Baseball’s mid-season exhibition game was ultimately decided via Home Run Phantasmagoria!*, with each league sending out a maximum of three designated mashers, who are ideally carrying Torpedo bats or old-fashioned cork-filled cheat-bombs to the plate.

The hitters get three swings to try to launch homers. Eventually, this stops, and then somebody counts up the HR totals with matchsticks. Ballgame. Loser buys the winner a Slurpee.

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It’s ridiculous, of course. On the other hand, nobody wants to see their favorite team’s pitching staff ground to the nubs by having to work extra innings in a game that counts for nothing. And on the other-other hand, we all seemed to universally hate Bud Selig for throwing his hands in the air back in 2002 and declaring the All-Star Game a tie after both teams ran out of pitchers.

When Selig did that, cries of “Let them play!” and “Bud must go!” rang out from the disaffected fans at Milwaukee’s Miller Park. This was noteworthy for two reasons: 1.) Selig was a local guy who owned the Brewers and was now getting roasted on national TV, and 2.) “Let them play!” is what they chanted during the crucial Astrodome sequence of the 1977 film The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, which received a 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes (meaning rotten) but which Bill Simmons, then with ESPN, declared the "third-best sequel ever," behind Godfather 2 and Terminator 2 but ahead of Lethal Weapon 2 and Beverly Hills Cop 2.

Naturally, this sequence involved Tanner Boyle.

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So anyway — a home run derby to decide a game in extra innings here in 2025.

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Tell you what: It’s not worse than what MLB is doing right now, which is to station a runner on second base to begin each half-inning in extras, even though that person has done absolutely nothing to deserve being placed there. In fact, the runner by rule must be the player who made the last out for his team during the previous inning. It’s almost like he’s being punished for making the third out by being forced to go stand there at second the following inning. Look at me! I failed last inning!

If that runner subsequently scores, the run doesn’t count as earned against the opposing team’s pitcher. Why? Because the pitcher didn’t put the runner at second — MLB did.

The idea is strictly to save on pitcher wear and tear over the course of the long regular season. In the old days, roughly one eyeblink ago, a Major League game that went into extra innings could severely strain a pitching staff by (potentially) forcing innumerable relievers to trudge to the mound until somebody won. The idea of placing a ghost runner at 2B is to speed up the scoring process, burn fewer arms, and get us all to the finish line, then into our cars or on the subway for the ride home.

The Home Run Phantasmagoria!* might take a little more time than the ghost-runner gambit — although I’m not sure about that — but its watchability would be off the charts. If, say, the Dodgers go to extras, they might send out Ohtani, Freeman and Betts to take hacks off batting-practice throwers. The Cubs? Suzuki, Crow-Armstrong, Tucker. Yankees? Judge, Jazz, Bellinger. Angels? (I’m serious.)

I’d stick around to watch. My team might place a premium on stocking some mashers, since upward of 10% of all regular-season games go to extras. We get a little bang for our ballpark buck. Who says no?

(*Home Run Phantasmagoria! trademark 2025 The Dope.)

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