Publicity stunts are all fun and games until they become law.

So it is with Major League Baseball interleague play.

Like an agent-arranged, one-weekend marriage of two C-list celebrities in Las Vegas, it gave us something to talk about one lazy, 1990s summer.

We had our chance to be intrigued, outraged or unaffected. And that’s where it should have ended.

Interleague play had relatively innocent origins and intentions. It was supposed to make us forget that an entire sport left us hanging with the labor dispute that killed a pennant race and a fall classic in 1994.

The commissioner’s office sought to engender forgiveness by showing us something we’d never seen. Great, but didn’t Cal Ripken showing up for work every day and a bunch of synthetically created Michelin Men swatting hanging curve balls to Jupiter accomplish that?

Bud Selig gave a bravura performance as fiddling Nero while performance-enhancing drugs turned the national pastime into a laughingstock. Now he kicks back and lends his assent to a relatively silent killer.

Blending the American and National leagues like peanut butter and chocolate was supposed to be just that: A light, late-spring dessert.

After we’d been given our fill of contemptuous division rivals for a month or two, we’d get a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to encounter a natural, geographic rival from the other side of the tracks.

Yankees-Mets? Wonderful. Red Sox-Phillies? Bring it on. Cardinals-Royals? Hey, everybody not named Joaquin Andujar or Don Denkinger was excited about the historic implications of that Interstate-70 reunion.

Play a four-game series in each park and call it good. The end.

There were problems, not the least of which was the stroke of genius that an uneven number of teams inhabited the two leagues. To this day, there are two more teams in the NL than there are in the AL.

Another issue is baseball’s status as the sport that most closely resembles the United States economy. Think of the Yankees and Red Sox as Microsoft and Walmart and the Pirates as Dad’s Root Beer. There was not then, nor is there now, an equitable way to design a crossover schedule in a league that promotes the polar opposite of parity.

To nobody’s surprise, the Cubs were uneasy about playing home-and-home sets with the White Sox while division rival St. Louis had the opportunity to beat up Kansas City.

All that was outweighed by titanic ticket sales, even impacting franchises that otherwise couldn’t sell lemonade in the middle of the desert. And no sports commissioner in my lifetime has been as fixated on the bottom line, consequences be damned, as Selig.

Therefore, interleague play not only returned for an encore, it has survived and expanded for 15 years. An entire generation of youth players and fans can’t remember what baseball was like without it.

Now we get San Diego flying 3,000 miles to visit Fenway Park, and Boston jetting to Houston under the guise of “giving every fan a chance to see every other team.”

Never mind the tacit admission that only 40 percent of the teams are worth watching past May 15 every year. This enhanced exchange program creates a competitive imbalance that the game’s leadership ignores.

The AL has employed designated hitters for nearly 40 years. The NL fears the ghost of Abner Doubleday and requires its pitchers to create a vacuum in the lineup.

Imagine if the NBA’s Eastern Conference allowed five personal fouls and the Western counterparts normally were given six. Or if football’s AFC put 12 yards between the down markers instead of the NFC’s 10.

Examples too severe? I would argue that the question of pitchers batting or not batting has the same impact on the DNA of the game.

Rules of the home team’s league apply in interleague games. In either case, the visiting team is punished harshly.

NL teams carry an extra pitcher on their rosters and rarely have a player on their bench born to designated hit.

AL outfits, on the other hand, all have that guy on the payroll whose defensive talents make Bill Buckner look like Kevin Youkilis. Handing him a glove weakens the defense at best and risks season-altering injury at worst. Benching him puts your 24th man in the five-, six- or seven-hole, combining with the pitcher to give you two automatic outs in the lineup.

It’s bad enough when those unnecessary strategic conundrums screw up a good World Series each year. We don’t need to deal with it for 15, 20 or 30 games every summer.

The obvious, overdue solution is for the NL to move into the Nixon Administration, already, and adopt the DH.

Since that will never happen, lest Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann, George Will and Ken Burns have a group heart attack, let’s at least chalk up interleague play as the sorry result of a bad weekend bender.

Time to sign the annulment papers.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].