Lost Time Is Not Found Again is what the MPS blog crew has been reading today. Maybe.

+ Jenna Fischer and others take questions before the celebrity softball game in St. Louis. {Big League Stew.}

+ The average All-Star makes less money than the average Yankee. {Bugs & Cranks.}

+ Digging a bit deeper into Mad Dog’s rant on his radio show. {Fang’s Bites.}

+  A day at the Crossfit Games. {The Sporting Blog.}

+ Non-sports: Auto-Tune the News No. 6. {YouTube.} Microsoft is moving Office 2010 to the Web. {Mashable.}

Quotable:

“An All-Star game or any exhibition is, in a sense, anathema to a sport, in this sense: that whereas sports beg and demand to be taken seriously on a certain level, All-Star games are essentially about showing off.

Sports — perhaps BECAUSE they are fantastically trivial events in which nothing really is at stake — are fanatic, from the level of front offices on down, about taking the competition seriously. A football coach DEMANDS that you give your best effort on every play, even if you’re ahead 27-3 in the fourth quarter. Goofing around out there, acting silly on the field … there is very, very, very low tolerance for that, no matter the sport, no matter the level of competition. You can be playing high school football in the lowest level of competition known to man, and the coach is still going to insist that you give your best effort on every play.

It is a universal to sport: you take seriously the effort to win, always — except All-Star games, which are essentially about putting on a good show. The thing is, when you take the effort to win out of it, it ceases to be a good show.” – Bill James