First, a confession: There was a time when I thought the All-Star Home Run Derby was a great idea.
The thought of bringing the best power hitters together for a batting practice slugfest summoned memories of the old black-and-white Home Run Derby television show (even though I'm really not old enough to remember 1959) and unquestionably captured the imagination of baseball fans when the All-Star version debuted in 1985 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.
It made perfect sense. Fans - and not just the chicks - loved the long ball, and home runs still were coming in reasonable numbers in the mid-1980s. The "juiced-ball" era, which would eventually become known as the "juiced-player era," would begin a few years later and take the concept to a new level, but we were blissfully unaware of all that at the time. We, and by "we" I mean everyone from Major League Baseball brass to the media and the fans, wouldn't actually have to start lying to ourselves for another decade or so.
The Home Run Derby was one of several components of an expanded All-Star celebration that allowed baseball to maximize corporate sponsorship of the Midsummer Classic, and it immediately added a fan-friendly dimension to the All-Star workout day, which previously had been a perfunctory media event. It was fun and harmless and it provided some entertaining moments, most notably for Orioles fans when Cal Ripken Jr. dominated the contest at Toronto's SkyDome during his 1991 Most Valuable Player season.
So, it probably was a good idea when it was conceived, but the novelty has long since worn off, and you can make the case MLB's All-Star version of Muscle Beach Party remains a symbol of all that was wrong with baseball the past 20 years.
Maybe, at first glance, it seems like a stretch to link the Home Run Derby to baseball's steroid scandal, since the event predates the onset of the widespread abuse of illegal performance-enhancing substances, but the logic is inescapable. Though fans have long had a love-affair with the home run, the advent of a made-for-TV event focused entirely on how many and how far sent a clear message to future players that they needed to get bigger and stronger to be ready for prime time.
