After watching Adrian Gonzalez migrate from just 90 miles south of Tony Reagins and land in Boston just in time to get voted into the ASG as the starting first baseman, where he opened the scoring with a solo HR and put the AL into the lead, Ron Washington demonstrated his mastery of pitching options and sent his own CJ Wilson to the mound, where CJ promptly blew the lead, and the game. The NL did display their All-Star caliber defense, trying mightily to overcome Washington's managerial skills and get the AL back into the game with 2 called errors and another near miss (Prince Fielder's early fly ball folly, which the official scorekeeper ruled a hit and thereby allowed Prince to avoid embarrassment as he collected the game MVP due to his later 3-run HR).

Pretty much the balance of this affair was spent contending with the fingernails of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver dragging across the blackboards of the American love affair with baseball. But we TV aficionados did get treated to The Amazing Heath Bell. If we DO get this guy, Halos Heaven needs to sponsor a Heath Bell Microphone during game threads.

As far as our own Halos are concerned, apparently Weaver suffered some minor injury with his 116th pitch in the 9th inning of his complete game victory last week, while up by 4 runs. Certainly Sosh would not have allowed Weave to continue pitching, even a single pitch, had this happened at any time earlier, right? But there it was. After opening the ASG with a first inning shutout, Weaver pulled himself with the report of this "injury". Let's pray that he "recovers" in time for this weekend.

Waldo managed to get in some work, and got that every-once-in-a-while-bonehead-performance out of his system in a game that doesn't count. (Oops. Sorry Bud. Yeah, it counts! It counts!) "Jordan" started off strong and his 100mph fastball impressed the Fox announcing crew briefly enough to get them to stop talking about Derek Jeter. And then "Jordan" did as "Jordan" can do and allowed a run. Normally fatal to us in the 9th inning during games that count, here we merely moved on.

Howie got a chance to display the prominant 2011 Halo offense to America, launching an infield ground out with 2 baserunners in his first plate appearance. (Hey, at least he didn't get a chance to GIDP!) In Howie's second at-bat, with the bases loaded in the 9th inning, down by 4 with 2 outs, he CRUSHES the first pitch off the bat of the Giants' Brian Wilson over the left field....oh...wait....no. That didn't happen. Paul Konerko meekly grounded out with two men on to end the game with Howie still waiting in the on-deck circle...

(Next year, the official Halos Heaven drinking game shall involve one shot every time we hear the word "CRUSH", or any variant thereof, during any ASG related broadcast. Nobody shall get out of Las Vegas alive!)