Is there anything in sports more tiresome than the conveniently mindless romanticism of baseball?

This struck me as I was watching Brian Williams read the news through his makeup Wednesday night. He did a big segment on how -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- the All-Star Game ended in a tie and all of a sudden baseball is failing America all over again.

You know the routine: America looks to baseball to heal its wounds and set the tone and provide the pastoral simplicity and beauty we all lost the moment Wal-Mart replaced Main Street. Oh, and it's also the game that returns us to the innocence we traded in when we took our first paycheck and entered the world of the wage slave, feeling whole only when we're sitting at the ballpark, downing a $7 beer and thinking about what might have been.

	The black cloud continues to follow Bud.

Is there any way to stop this? Is there any way, in the name of Ken Burns, that reasonable people can still love baseball and not have to listen to, or defend against, this constant stream of phlegm? The problem, though, is that the people who run baseball obviously buy into the baseball eroticism. Or at least they think it sells.

All you have to do is look at Tuesday's pregame extravaganza (starring Ray Liotta in the role of Michael Buffer as Abraham Lincoln) to see it in full bloom. Which raises the question of why Rudy Giuliani was in the dugout, but that's probably for another day.

There's no denying baseball's problems, but does it always have to be billed as the nation's ointment? Of course it was ridiculous that the All-Star Game ended in a mealy-mouthed tie, that Bud Selig brought the boys inside as if the street lights came on and mom called everyone in for dinner. Starting next year, the teams should alternate wearing pink chiffon dresses and lavender bridesmaid's gowns.

But really, was it really a PR nightmare, yet another black mark on our tainted pastime? From here it looked like a bad situation that was handled poorly. It was also a game that carries no meaning. End of story.

(Joe Torre and Bob Brenly, by the way, deserve more blame than Selig in this mess. They're the ones who managed like a couple of longshot politicians, promising everything to everybody, then shuffled over to Bud when they couldn't pick up the tab. It's an offshoot of their near-comic insistence on including a third of their own rosters; of course they're going to play everybody. Are you going to explain why you didn't pitch Vicente Padilla or Freddy Garcia after you chose so many borderline guys from your own team?)

In the larger sense, understanding baseball isn't all that complicated. It might have been easier to go all Jacques Barzun on everybody 50 years ago, but when the average salary is nearly $2.5 mil and the majority of owners think it's their God-given right to extort a stadium from taxpayers, it's a little tougher to see the big leagues as anything other than what they are: a business.

So let baseball take you back to your youth or your father's youth if you'd like. Nothing wrong with that. Let Brian Williams tell us it's woven tightly into the fabric of our great nation if he wants. Most intelligent baseball fans can still love the game while understanding the owners and players have exactly one agenda: their own.

There's one salvation, though. At least the baseball-as-metaphor-for-life stuff is better than the other gathering cry: The All-Star Game as metaphor for this, The Season of Stoppage. You know this one, too: Isn't it ironic that in a season dominated by talk of a potential strike they couldn't even finish the All-Star Game? I mean, isn't it just so perfectly ironic?

Oh, well. Beats having to think.

This Week's Limited List

After all that, there was really only one solution: Groove one, Freddy, in the name of Chan Ho, groove one.

Something we all learned before the All-Star Game: Those rockets, they gave glare.

Which, if you think about it: It's probably true, in a purely technical sense.

And also up a creek without a paddle, and therefore between a rock and a hard place: An expert on something or other, telling us about it Thursday on MSNBC, said, "They're left holding the bag, and therefore on the short end of the stick."

At the time of his statement, Bud didn't know the Diamondbacks were going to get a big break when Randy Johnson forgot to turn in his timecard this week: So now that it turns out every team in the big leagues will make payroll this week, does that mean Selig was lying or just talking out of an inappropriate orifice?

Rudy Giuliani: The Yankees' Youppi.

Just for the heck of it: Bruce Kison.

I know, back to picking over that one word, but still: Someone needs to explain to me why it's suddenly "ironic" that this is the first off-season Allen Iverson has stayed primarily in Philadelphia.

We all have certain sentences we'd rather weren't attached to our names after our death, and here's one: The family continues to battle over the remains.

And finally, sorry if I seem a little cranky this week, but I have a confession to make: I've been up all night every night this week since the ESPYs, rollin' with Snoop Dogg and Jimmy Houston.

Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at tim.keown@espnmag.com.