Baseball is a game that comes with a certain degree of randomness. There are stats and occurrences that defy convention and prediction. Randomness is part of the beauty of baseball, but it shouldn’t be part of awarding home field in the World Series.

Using the All-Star Game, an exhibition game that is a relic of a sepia-toned time, to decide home field in the pinnacle of the sport is about as random as it gets. It’s arbitrarily assigning great significance to a game that is not of great importance. It’s worse than a coin flip, because a coin flip is based on chance.

This is based on choice, a horrible, ill-conceived, misguided, reactive choice that stems from another random baseball occurrence, the 7-7 tie at the 2002 All-Star Game in former commissioner Bud Selig’s backyard, Milwaukee. It’s a choice that makes baseball look silly.

Tied at a game apiece, the Theo & Tito World Series rolls on Friday at Wrigley Field with the Chicago Cubs trying to expunge more than a century of championship futility. If you don’t have a rooting connection to the Cleveland Indians or a particular affinity for former Red Sox manager Terry Francona and you’re rooting against the Cubs, then you’re a sports grinch. Sorry.

If the Cubs are going to defeat the Indians and have their trademark “W’’ flag fly for a World Series winner, they’re going to have to do it without the benefit of home-field advantage, despite winning 103 games during the regular season, eight more than the next-best team and nine more than the Indians.

But because the American League All-Stars beat the National League All-Stars in July in San Diego, that’s all rendered moot.

I get it. Baseball is different. For all the consolidation of umpires and administration, the American League and the National League are still two different entities with different playing rules. Comparing National League and American League records isn’t an exact science.

But it’s still preferable to using the least important baseball game on the calendar to determine where the most important games on the calendar are played.

Go back to alternating years between the AL and NL, have the league that fares better in interleague play get home field, have a coin flip, flip bottles for it, or how about the novel idea of simply going with the team with the best regular-season record?

We’ve had interleague play for 20 seasons now (it was instituted in 1997), so the idea of simply picking the team with the best record shouldn’t be complete anathema. No sport clings to the sanctity of its regular season like baseball.

Why play all those games if they don’t add up to one exhibition game?

According to the Society for American Baseball Research, from 1925 to 2002 baseball used an alternating-league format to award home field in the World Series.

The exception was 1935, when the American League hosted for the second year in a row because a close three-team pennant race in the National League complicated scheduling.

Two weeks before the end of the season, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis decided to start the 1935 World Series in the American League city, instead of letting the NL take its turn. The National League pennant winner that year was . . . the Chicago Cubs.

They lost the World Series to the Detroit Tigers in six games. Detroit scored the winning run in Game 6 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth on a Goose Goslin single to right field.

Maybe home field won’t cost the Cubs in this World Series. But it’s worth noting that the Cubs had the best home record in baseball this season (57-24). The Indians tied for the second-best home mark at 53-28.

Cleveland had not lost at home this postseason until the Kyle Schwarber-led Cubs won, 5-1, in Game 2 Wednesday night.

Francona’s team is a different one at Progressive Field. Cleveland had the third-highest OPS at home (.827), behind the Colorado Rockies and your Red Sox. The Indians also ranked third in runs scored at home. The Fightin’ Franconas ranked 28th out of 30 teams in road OPS (.691) and hit .236 on the road versus .288 at home.

The accursed Cubbies actually hit for a higher average, hit more home runs, and posted a higher OPS on the road this season. But other than hitting 19 more home runs away from the Friendly Confines (109), the batting average and OPS numbers are similar.

However, the Cubs had the best home earned run average in baseball at 2.72 and batting average against at .203. On the road, Chicago posted a 3.60 ERA, still the second-best road ERA. The same goes for their .221 batting average against. Overall, they sported an MLB-best 3.15 ERA and .212 batting average against.

If the Indians win their first World Series since 1948, the MVP award might have to be split between Kansas City Royals Salvador Perez (who was the World Series MVP in 2015) and Eric Hosmer. Those two players drove in all four American League runs in its 4-2 All-Star Game victory in July.

The good news is that since the All-Star Game was given artificial importance there hasn’t been another tie. The bad news is that the game has become stuck in limbo, somewhere between an entertaining exhibition and an intense postseason-worthy contest. It’s neither.

The All-Star Game has become a baseball black hole.

The reality is that using the All-Star Game to decide home field for the Fall Classic has been damaging to the Midsummer Classic. This year’s All-Star Game garnered record-low ratings, registering a 5.4. The 2015 game got a 6.6, which had been the record low.

It’s clear after 14 games of “This time it counts,’’ the format is not equipped to pull in television viewers or determine home field in the World Series.

It’s Selig’s no-fun folly.

There has to be a better way to settle World Series home field, which is really any other way.

Christopher L. Gasper can be reached at cgasper@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @cgasper.