All-Star Games are notoriously boring from a competitive level. In football, there’s no real tackling or hitting. In basketball, no one plays defense. And in baseball, you have the oddity of having the least known players pitching and batting in the most important innings of the game while the stars sit in the dugout (if they haven’t already headed to the airport.)

But that’s fine, because the purpose of these games is that they are EXHIBITIONS that are designed to show off the players’ skills, not games that matter. So if we are willing to consider the Major League Baseball All-Star game a true exhibition, here’s a radical idea to make it more interesting.

In a nutshell: Don’t have a lineup.

Now what does that mean?

1. Each manager will have their roster of 23 field players. In this proposal, we would keep the tradition that the 9 starters are the players the fans chose, and let them have the grand introduction in the beginning. But after those first 9 batters and one inning in the field, anything goes (almost).
2. The purpose of this proposal is to set up the highest number of the most interesting matchups between pitcher and hitter. So once the 1st 9 guys have batted, Managers get to look down their bench and send up anyone they want.
3. We would set some limitations, such as: (a) No batter would hit twice in the same inning. (b) No batter can have a 3rd at bat until every field player on the team has batted once.
4. Defensively, anything goes. Let’s put together really fun defensive alignments for an inning, such as old teammates playing together, the oldest group possible, the youngest group possible, players from all the 1st place teams, all the 1st timers, everyone with a gold glove, or whatever other combination you can think of.
5. You could also make it interactive, by allowing fans to use the MLB mobile app to choose the next hitters one inning.
6. Basically, the idea is to have the most interesting combinations of pitchers, batters and fielders for 9 innings, and make it the most fun for the fans to watch.

So all the stuffy old dudes will read this and say, “No I like it how it is.” And that’s fine. But this seems like an easy way to add some fun to the game.