History will abound at the All-Star Game next week, as Major League Baseball celebrates the final season in Yankee Stadium. And even though it will be a Red Sox manager operating out of the Yankee dugout, Terry Francona does not lack in appreciation of the magnitude of this occasion.

Francona has indicated that he plans to pay homage to New York Yankee star Mariano Rivera by having the greatest reliever in baseball history close out the game. If recent history is any indication, it will be a save situation for Rivera and another American League victory. The AL is a vastly superior league to the National League--this season the junior circuit was once again dominant in interleague play, winning 149 and losing 102--and has not lost an All-Star Game since back in 1996, which, to put it in perspective, was the final year of Bill Clinton's first term in the White House.

Frankly, even given the talent deficit in the National League, this winless streak puzzles me. Albert Pujols ought to be able to singlehandedly win just one of these games. For some reason, baseball's All-Star Game, despite its apparent random and even capricious nature, has always accurately reflected any talent disparity between the two leagues. From 1960 to 1985, when the National League was clearly superior thanks largely to management that more quickly embraced African-American and Hispanic ballplayers--think Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente--the American League won only three All-Star Games (and there were two All-Star Games in three of those years) and, at one point, lost 11 consecutive Midsummer Classics.

The current trend is particularly good news for fans of American League teams like Boston, Anaheim, the White Sox, the Yankees and Tampa Bay (did I just write Tampa Bay?) since victory in the All-Star Game now dictates home-field advantage in the World Series. Give a superior team the first two games at home--especially the Red Sox, so dominant in Fenway Park--and you are practically gift-wrapping the championship for the American League winner. Which helps account for three AL sweeps in the last four seasons, two of them by Boston.

Of course, none of what happens in the Bronx next Tuesday will yield a clue as to which American League team will get to take advantage of the All-Star boost.  Which gets me back to the incomparable Mr. Rivera. Over 14 seasons in New York, Rivera has saved 466 games, third all-time, and has a remarkably skimpy ERA of 2.20; this season, at age 38 and after some skeptics suggested the Yankees would regret giving him a three-year contract extension, he boasts an ERA of 1.12, the lowest mark of his career. With the Yankees in third place behind the Tampa Bay Rays and the Red Sox and young Hank Steinbrenner trying his best to imitate dad in his blustering heyday, it's easy to overlook what a good job manager Joe Girardi has done with his ballclub. He has had a raft of injuries to his best hitters, two of his three highly touted young pitchers have been total busts and LaTroy Hawkins, who was signed at no small cost to stabilize the bullpen in front of Rivera, has been so bad he is now used only in mop-up situations.

Former Yankee manager Joe Torre, for all his virtues, was a butcher when it came to handling his bullpen. When he found a reliever other than Rivera that he trusted, he used him again and again until the pitcher was hurt or had nothing left for the postseason. There is a long list of relievers that Torre abused--Scott Proctor, for example, has never been the same since throwing a combined 189 innings of relief in 2006-2007--but there is no better example of how costly Torre's approach was than the miraculous Red Sox comeback in the 2004 ALCS. No player, not Dave Roberts, not even David Ortiz was more instrumental in that final result than Yankee reliever Tom Gordon. Flash got the call from Torre 80 times during the regular season, the most appearances of his fine career, and had sustained a nifty 2.21 ERA; but by the playoffs against Boston, when Torre called upon Gordon six more times, he was spent and his ERA soared to 8.10. (Gordon took the mound 79 times the next season and hasn't been the same pitcher since.). Girardi has had a steady hand with young relievers like Edwar Ramirez and Jose Veras and somehow shown (or faked) enough confidence in Kyle Farnsworth that the fireballing righthander has actually become a somewhat reliable contributor.

I believe that, in the modern game, bullpens, particularly middle relief, have emerged as a decisive factor. For all the Red Sox heroics last year--you can talk Manny and Big Papi, World Series MVP Mike Lowell, the infusion of youth with Dustin Pedroia and Jacoby Ellsbury and the top to bottom pitching with Josh Beckett and Jonathan Papelbon--anybody who watched that team day in day out knows that Hideki Okajima was the MVP, a shutdown link between the starting pitching and closer Papelbon. Last year Okajima averaged less than a baserunner an inning; this season he appears hapless, averaging 1.38 baserunners per inning, as is just about every other Red Sox reliever other than the closer. That bullpen collective already has 16 losses in 2008, two more than during the entire 2007 season.

You can talk about Tampa Bay's standout, young lineup (third baseman Evan Longoria is the real deal and has more RBIs and fewer errors than A-Rod) and its exceptional starting pitching over the first half of the season. But the performance of the Rays' no-name bullpen--Dan Wheeler, Trever Miller, Grant Balfour, J. P. Howell, Gary Glover, Kurt Birkins--has been the biggest difference-maker. The no-longer-Devil Rays are the best story in baseball's first half, better than the strong play of a Cubs team that was at least expected to compete. If Tampa Bay falters in the AL East with the Red Sox and Yankees giving chase, my guess is it will be the Rays bullpen where the cracks show. The Yankees seem to have their bullpen in working order, but the team's starting pitching remains so suspect that exceptional relief may not be enough. When Yankee fans are actually talking about the possible return of Carl Pavano, you know there is some desperation there. Even if Ortiz returns to the Red Sox lineup, the defending champs will be hard-pressed to repeat if they can't find some outs in their bullpen.

While relief pitching is always available in the trade market at this point in the season, it usually comes at inflated prices. And it seems almost impossible, even for the savviest GM, to predict who will be a solution and who will become part of the problem. National League pitchers, used to bigger ballparks and weaker lineups, seem particularly chancy. Last year Red Sox GM Theo Epstein was credited with the coup of the trading deadline when he landed Texas closer Eric Gagne to join Okajima in setting up for Papelbon. Gagne proved to more of a poison pill, blowing so many leads that that he almost singlehandedly drew the Yankees back into the race. And for a painful footnote, among those dealt for Gagne's two-month horror show was a young outfielder named David Murphy who, so far this season, only has as many RBIs as Manny Ramirez.

Pitching in baseball madhouses like Boston or New York just isn't the same as pitching in Texas or other less rabid environs. Back in 2003, the Red Sox tried to solve bullpen woes by dealing with the Pittsburgh Pirates for Scott Sauerbeck, a lefty who was described as unhittable by left-handed batters. If he was unhittable in Boston, it was largely because he couldn't throw the ball over the plate, walking more than one batter an inning and compiling an ERA of 6.48. Part of the price for Sauerbeck was Freddy Sanchez, who would go on to win a batting crown--.344 in 2006--in Pittsburgh. And even when the reliever does everything asked of him to help usher a team into the playoffs, as Larry Anderson did for the Red Sox back in 1988, the price can still be too high. The Sox were swept in the opening series by Oakland, Anderson was pitching in San Diego the next season and the kid Boston dealt for him, Jeff Bagwell, stayed in Houston for 15 years, hit 449 home runs, won an N.L. MVP and played in four All-Star Games.

While the Red Sox contemplate that history, Tuesday night is a chance for all fans of the game to appreciate Rivera. Baseball debates are at the heart of fandom. Mantle vs. Mays? Where does Barry Bonds fit in the game's pantheon? Is A-Rod a boon for or a drag on his team? But there is no debate at all about where Mariano Rivera stands at his position: all alone-best ever!