A somewhat cynical baseball fan of my acquaintance suggests that the question ought not to be if, but what time the lights will fail at Fenway Park next Tuesday night.

The charming little home of the Boston Red Sox is the Major Leagues' oldest ballpark. It is also, alas, the smallest in terms of seating capacity, which is officially set at 33,871. The team's management would love to tear it down and replace it with a more modern facility, plans which have been tempered by a groundswell of nostalgia among the tradition-minded aficianados of the sport. That Fenway will host the annual All-Star Game on Tuesday offers both sides something of a forum.

Fenway Park opened in April of 1912. The Red Sox beat the New York Highlanders (later to become the Yankees) 7-6 in extra innings that day, although the event was displaced from the front pages of the local newspapers by flash reports on the sinking of the Titanic.

In the intervening years the venue has come to be celebrated as the last vestige of an era in which sporting grounds were shoehorned into their urban environments, their dimensions described by the idiosyncratic nooks and crannies of streets and neighbourhoods. As a baseball shrine, Fenway stands in stark contrast to the circular, multi-sport facilities that began springing up all over America in the early 1960s. If you led a man out to second base at Veterans' Stadium in Philadelphia, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, or Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, and removed his blindfold, he'd be hard-pressed to know which venue he was standing in.

Then, early in this decade, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction. Camden Yards in Baltimore and then Jacobs Field in Cleveland are new arenas patently designed to produce a more traditional atmosphere, with asymmetrical dimensions and a charming old-time ambience.

Now that the battle lines have been drawn, I suppose I must accept responsibility for having been something of a conduit in this little game of public manipulation. It was five years ago this spring, John Harrington, the Red Sox CEO, revealed to me his vision of the future. He loved Fenway as much as the next fellow, said Harrington, but the cathedral had long outlived its usefulness and would soon become redundant. Instead of replacing it with a more modern facility, Harrington's proposal was to replicate Fenway Park in all its intimacy, right down to the Green Monster and the bullpens in the right field, but with an extra 15,000 seats available for paying customers.

Half a decade after I unwittingly floated what was clearly meant to be a trial balloon, the architectural plans were officially unveiled. Shortly an opposition group of vocal fans called "Save Fenway Park" was formed, and the debate continues to rage in every bar-room in Boston. A similar debate, it might be noted, raged for years over the fate of the old Boston Garden. A crumbling venue in which Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano had fought, and the Boston Celtics had won 16 world championships, had become a rat-infested monument to urban decay, but it wasn't until the air-conditioning failed and allowed the ice to melt on the day of a scheduled Boston Bruins-Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup play-off game that the argument was finally won. The new ultra-modern Fleet Centre was built and the Boston Garden subsequently torn down. Only the unrepentant cynic might anticipate similar skulduggery at Fenway Park next Tuesday night.

Publicly celebrated as "the Midsummer Classic," the All-Star break is viewed by most players as a welcome respite from a long and gruelling season. Even those who are chosen to play in it would sometimes rather have the three days off, and beg out of performing with an assortment of maladies, real and imagined.

The great Red Sox left-fielder Ted Williams, for instance, lost five years' worth of statistics by serving as a Marine Corps pilot during World War II and the Korean War, but Williams also lost another half-season when he broke his left elbow crashing into a fence in an All-Star game.

For the first four decades of the All-Star game's existence, fans elected the starting line-ups in a month-long plebiscite conducted at ballparks around the nation. Then, in 1957, a Cincinnati radio station was inspired to conduct a high-profile campaign which resulted, somewhat laughably, in virtually the entire Reds' team being voted onto the All-Star team. Ford Frick, the commissioner at the time, overturned several of the selections, and it wasn't until 1970 that the fans were once again deemed sufficiently responsible to be entrusted with the franchise.

While there have been controversial selections since, this year's process appears destined to re-ignite the debate.

The American League of the late 1990s has been unexpectedly blessed with a plethora of quality shortstops: Derek Jeter of the Yankees, Alex Rodriguez of the Seattle Mariners, and Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox have all put up extraordinary offensive numbers at what is traditionally a defensive-minded position, while Cleveland's Omar Vizquel remains the slickest-fielding shortstop in the league.

Last year, after Rodriguez and Jeter finished one-two in the voting, Cleveland manager Mike Hargrove filled out his roster with his own player, Vizquel. Thus it was that Garciaparra, who would finish second in the voting for the AL's Most Valuable Player award at the season's end, was left off the All-Star team altogether.

This year, with Rodriguez injured, that controversy did not obtain, but the Jeter-Garciaparra fan vote developed into an absorbing issue. Both New York manager Joe Torres and his Boston counterpart Jimmy Williams publicly lobbied their fans to vote for the respective players.

The two were neck-and-neck in the voting tabulations until the final week when Garciaparra surge ahead to finish with 1,089,974 votes. Jeter was second with 1,069,528 and Vizquel third with 1,038,362.

The subsequent explanation that the previously-uncounted cyber-vote had put Garciaparra over the top will only buttress criticism that putting the decision in the hands of the fans reduces the selection process to a popularity contest. It could and probably should be noted that if Cal Ripken's name were still on the ballot as a shortstop, neither Garciaparra nor Jeter (nor Rodriguez nor Vizquel) would have to worry about the controversy, for the issue would not exist. Ripken was elected 13 straight years as the American League shortstop, and has been picked for each of the past three years as the third baseman since moving over to that position as a concession to advancing age. (He will be 39 next month.) The Ancient Oriole sees no inherent conflict in granting universal suffrage to the teeming masses.

"That's the way the All-Star game works, " shrugged Ripken "The fans vote for the players they want to see."