By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Leave it to Major League Baseball. On second thought, don't. Don't leave anything of importance or value — All-Star game tradition or the integrity of a promising regular season — to it right now.

We were reminded of just how much baseball can bungle even a sure thing these days by last night's incomplete 7-7, 11-inning All-Star game standoff.

For the first time in 73 games, a game went unfinished and undecided for reasons other than inclement weather. Soccer matches end in ties. Baseball games don't. At least until last night, that is.

Until then the All-Star game was one of the few things that baseball has managed to continue to do better than its sports entertainment rivals, the NFL, NBA and NHL.

For a while it looked like they would do it again. For more than 3 hours it was everything an All-Star game should be. It was big names, touching moments and did-you-see-that plays in close, exciting competition.

Then, we were reminded of the befuddled state of baseball when this game, the centerpiece of the season that was once known as the Mid-Summer Classic ended like a beer-league softball game with not enough pitchers to continue, no plan for an alternative and nobody happy about it.

And, the feel-good Ted Williams Award that was to have gone to the MVP of the game went unrewarded, another symbol of a night gone wrong.

It ended with people on hand who had shelled out $175 for a ticket cursing all concerned and people at home shouting at their television sets. It finished with commissioner Bud Selig, who figured he had a can't-lose appearance in his hometown of Milwaukee, more wrong and perplexed than ever.

Thus, a night that had begun promisingly enough with ceremonies that featured Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Cal Ripken Jr. honoring the past, ended up by adding to baseball's mounting black eyes of the present.

What was to have been a celebration of the sport and a brief respite from growing questions about steroid use, contraction and gathering storm clouds of a strike instead became another example of baseball's problems and inattention to its dwindling fans.

Maybe, as American League manager Joe Torre put it, "you can't have it both ways" in seeing every player perform in every game. But it shouldn't have come to this point.

There is no reason — other than owners' reluctance to fork over more All-Star bonuses, you suspect — to keep the rosters at just 30 players a side. Nor was there a reason not to have selections include a "disaster" pitcher or two who could be called on to toil if the game reached extra innings. That's called a "contingency plan" and most businesses that give a hoot about their customers, especially multi-billion dollar ones, have one.

Unfortunately, this most bizarre of All-Star games may turn out to be a fitting ode to the season. For if baseball goes on strike this year as is feared, an incomplete All-Star game will have been an all-too-apt precursor.