<table> </table> NEW YORK | Grady Sizemore has no dog in this fight. His Indians are buried in last place, behind even the Royals, and just traded their Cy Young winner.</p><p>Safe to say home-field advantage in this year&#8217;s World Series means as much to him as the color of your living-room walls, so he comes to this question without bias:</p><p>Was the 15-inning All-Star Game a better argument for or against having it decide where a potential game seven of the World Series is played?</p><p>&#8220;Against,&#8221; he says. &#8220;You try to get everybody in for nine innings, then you get guys dragging and overexposed. We were using (pitchers) that probably shouldn&#8217;t even throw.&#8221;</p><p>This is not some esoteric question, either. Home teams are winning 56.9 percent of the time this year, the highest rate in years, and one equal to a 92-win team. What&#8217;s more, home teams have won the last eight World Series game sevens, a stretch that dates back to 1982.</p><p>So we&#8217;re talking about a real advantage here, and commissioner Bud Selig has his reasons for liking it this way &#8212; and sending Major League Baseball reps to each dugout around the eighth inning Tuesday to let them know there would be no ties.</p><p>Selig is in a tough spot, of course. The home-field tie-in is his idea, and he defends it whenever asked. That 2002 game in Milwaukee &#8212; Selig&#8217;s home park &#8212; that ended in a tie remains an embarrassment for him. Fox Sports executives wanted some added significance to the game, so Selig gave them home-field advantage.</p><p>He says he&#8217;s &#8220;mystified&#8221; that many people in and around baseball aren&#8217;t on board with the idea. He says the game is played harder now than it used to be, and fewer stars are skipping.</p><p>So the tie-in remains, even with growing concerns about how close Tuesday&#8217;s game came to disaster &#8212; Evan Longoria or J.D. Drew was going to pitch next.</p><p>&#8220;They can grumble, whine or bitch about it, but you didn&#8217;t use Einstein&#8217;s theory of relativity to determine where the game was played before,&#8221; Selig says. &#8220;One year he got it, then one year he got it. Now, as a matter of fact, you&#8217;ve got the league that wins it and they manage to win now and everybody plays to win now.&#8221;</p><p>Television and the money that follows it are the biggest reasons for this change, so it&#8217;s interesting to note that viewership has actually decreased.</p><p>In the last three years of a true exhibition, the All-Star Game was watched by 14.7, 16, and 14.6 million people, respectively. In the five years afterward, those numbers were 13.7, 13.9, 12.3, 14.4 and 12.5 million. Final numbers for Tuesday&#8217;s game were not immediately available.</p><p>There are other factors besides the change that could affect viewership, of course, not the least of which is that fans may have been turned off by the 2002 tie.</p><p>Whatever the cause, there is a case to be made for home-field advantage riding on the All-Star Game, and Selig&#8217;s not the only one making it. Remember when John Kruk took the opportunity to ham it up after being buzzed by Randy Johnson in the 1993 game?</p><p>You don&#8217;t see that kind of thing anymore, or at least not as often. Even some players against this-time-it-counts concede that the game is played and managed differently now than 10 years ago.</p><p>&#8220;Whether it&#8217;s the perfect solution, I&#8217;m not sure,&#8221; says Padres manager Bud Black. &#8220;But it does give the game more oomph than before. Just from watching it, as the years went on, it might&#8217;ve lost a little bit of the game that I used to watch as a kid in the &#8217;60s or &#8217;70s. So it needed something.&#8221;