All-Star Game Lead-In's Hits and Misses - Leading Off No Major League Baseball event would be official without the proper levels of absurdity, so yes, the All-Star Game can officially proceed now that the Home Run Derby devolved into a hometown uproar and Tony La Russa has poured a bucket of mud on the fun by snubbing the Mets knuckleballer R.A. Dickey as the National League starter. By the end of Monday night, Detroit's Prince Fielder had restored a little order to the proceedings by pulverizing more baseballs than anyone else and doing his best imitation of, well, Prince Fielder. That part was impressive, as Jayson Stark writes on ESPN.com, because Fielder was built for a home run derby, Joe Lemire writes on SI.com. His final blast also mercifully ended the booing of Robinson Cano of the Yankees, whose every blink drew howls from the Kansas City crowd because as the American League home run captain he had passed over the Royals' Billy Butler when selecting the team. This caps a trend by recent All-Star fans to turn what is normally a controversy-free spectacle into a reason to vent their collective spleen. The Royals fans took it too far in the opinion of Foxsports.com's Jon Paul Morosi, but as Anthony Witrado writes in The Sporting News, baseball gets some blame too because it could just mandate a home team player must be in the derby and be done with the spleen-emptying. Cano handled it as well as anyone could, well, aside from that hitting-no-homers part, which made the boo-birds happy. It was then time to move on to dismay over La Russa's choice of San Francisco's Matt Cain over Dickey as starting pitcher, which John Harper of The Daily News believes is La Russa's latest example of overthinking. Ken Davidoff of The New York Post hopes Dickey uses the snub as motivation. Monday's other news was similarly ephemeral in nature, full of things that have not really happened. The N.B.A. was transfixed with a supposedly proposed trade that will involve at least 10 players and send Dwight Howard to the Nets. Howard's current team, the Magic, holds the key to this one, and Chris Tomasson argues on Foxsports.com that the team does not gain anything by rushing into this. The team with the most to gain is the Nets because even if Howard brings his migraine-producing side to Brooklyn, a player of his caliber wanting to come to the Nets qualifies as a whole new era, as Howard Beck writes in The New York Times. The other New York N.B.A. team, the Knicks, seemed intent on joining a past era with its signing of Marcus Camby to go with another yesteryear star, Jason Kidd. Raise your hand if you had no idea Marcus Camby was still playing. Yes, you are in good company. The day's other nonstory was Lance Armstrong's suing the United States Anti-Doping Agency for bringing doping charges against him. It gained the non part when a judge took mere hours to throw out his suit, calling it more of a diatribe than a legal argument. That put Armstrong in a bad position quickly, writes Bonnie Ford on ESPN.com, and Michael McCann writes on SI.com that Armstrong will have to be as tenacious in this legal fight as he was on a bike because he has almost everything working against him. United States soccer goalie Hope Solo, meanwhile, avoided such a mess when Usada let her off with a warning for her positive test for a frowned-upon diuretic. As punishment, they could have had her pick a Home Run Derby team and be booed. That would have been more than absurd enough for baseball.