Once again, the American League has claimed home field advantage in this year’s World Series based on the smallest of sample sizes. Rather than take the data accumulated during a 162 game season, baseball would rather take one meaningless game and try to draw some meaning out of it.

It was the most epic of overreactions to one game baseball has ever seen. Ever since that shameful tie in Milwaukee we have been subjected to this crap way of determining home field.

Fine, it’s never going to change, even if it is epically stupid, just like the WBC.

Things need to change with the exhibition formerly known as an exhibition. If this game is supposed to mean something, take it out of the hands of the fans. Fan voting got us Soriano in fourth place, one spot away from an outfield spot. Fans are stupid. Red Sox fans just vote for all the Red Sox, Cubs fans are drunken frat boys who if they are lucky enough to not piss all over the ballot, piss on it anyway with stupid write in votes like ANDRES BLANCO MAN! FTW!, and everyone else doesn’t know enough about baseball to vote for Shane Victorino over Alfonso Soriano.

You need to…shudder…hand the responsibilities to the BBWAA. I know they are righteous and holier than thou, but for the most part their hearts are in the right place. Secondly, cut the damn roster to 25, and get rid of that stupid “every team needs a rep” rule. That is by far the dumbest rule in American sports, I don’t know of another sports league that does it. Put the best players in and let them go at it.

Lastly, stop treating it like pageantry and treat it like an actual game. I know it’s a big deal, but honestly, that crap is distracting with the parade and the whole thing that goes on. Just let them play.

Of course, you can keep everything as is if you do the smart thing Selig and make it not matter. Treat it like it is an All Star game. No one will get mad at you if it doesn’t matter anymore, and for the most part, everyone remains happy.

We all know the best way to determine home field is by utilizing the data that you collected over 162 games rather than just one. It should belong to the best record, and that should really be that.

I’ve heard a lot of things from a lot of different folk, but one of the more perplexing ones I’ve read is one saying that Glavine was better than Randy Johnson.

Naturally I thought about it, and couldn’t come up with one way that Glavine was better. Not one. I don’t like doing this stuff because Glavine is part of that holy rotation of Maddux Smoltz and Glavine. He’s one of the sacred cows of baseball and if you happen to say something along the lines of, oh, say, he wasn’t as good as his final stats indicate people start to get pretty mad.

I remember him being a lot better than what I saw on baseball reference to tell you the truth. I’m rather sad that he wasn’t as dominant as I thought he was. I tried to find a meaningful metric in which Glavine was better and there just really isn’t one. You can say that Glavine was a better winner, but you’d be wrong for multiple reasons.

One, he won the World Series as many times as Randy did. With all that winning he was doing this seems extremely curious. For two he may have led the league in wins an ungodly amount of the time but Randy still has a better winning percentage. For three saying things like “he was a better winner” only carries merit in the rarest of cases. You can make the case that Bob Gibson was a better winner than Don Drysdale because they exist as two outliers on a graph. They represent the extremes of baseball. The “proven winner” theory is a myth, and if you don’t believe me there are numerous cases of Pitchers being chased out of towns for not winning enough only to win a lot somewhere else, the one that sticks out in my mind the most being Dave Stewart.

Chased out of Texas for being a loser in 1984, he went to Philly then was traded to Oakland where he won 20 games 4 times in a row. Ended up with a ring too. And if you’ll say that RJ choked in the clutch, he had a lower WHIP than Glavine did in the playoffs and a comparable ERA.

There is not one metric that shows Glavine being superior to Randy Johnson. Maybe earlier in their careers, but not when you take the entiriety of their careers into consideration. Well actually, Glavine was a better hitter, but c’mon, that has nothing to do with pitching.

Look, Glavine was a fine pitcher, but he runs into the same problem that oh say, Alfonso Soriano runs into; they are both very good players who often get mistaken for being great ones. Does Glavine belong in the Hall of Fame? I’d have to say yes, but he wouldn’t make my list of the top 50 players of all time where Randy Johnson does.