The Major League Baseball All-Star Game rosters will be announced Sunday night. In the hours and days leading up to the July 15 game, there will be a lot of ink spilled and bandwidth and airwaves clogged debating the merits of the participants in a game most people will stop watching by the fourth inning.

That is, if they tune in at all.

Baseball’s All-Star Game is no longer the national must-see event it used to be. Everyone knows this and we won’t waste any time rehashing the reasons why. Baseball should stop focusing on trying to return the game to its former glory and turn its attention to using it to make baseball relevant on the global stage.

Major League Baseball games are simply too slow and the season too long to grab kids’ attention these days. Sure, they’ll watch the Red Sox or whoever their local team is on television occasionally. And no kid is going to turn down Dad when he has a couple of tickets to the ballgame.

But there is too much else going on, and too many other things that offer gratification more readily, to keep them engaged. Baseball is unwilling to make meaningful changes to speed up the game, so its demographics keep getting older and older.

Baseball caters to the older crowd because that’s who has the money. And yet even Commissioner for Life Bud Selig recognizes that it’s losing future fans and talent to sports it wouldn’t have considered competition 25 years ago.

Even if you haven’t already been lectured by your friendly neighborhood soccer booster, you still may have noticed the sport’s appeal is growing with the same younger set. And, on a more local level, lacrosse has exploded as a spring sport and has taken a big bite out of high school participation in baseball.

Soccer and lacrosse both have international origins. The economy has gone global and so have sports. Major League Baseball has already shown it’s trying to keep up with several international initiatives, including the World Baseball Classic and opening the season in Japan and Australia in recent years. Now it’s time to take its global game to the next level using the All-Star Game.

Baseball needs to do two things — hold the game annually in a foreign country and adopt a USA vs. the World format for the game, not just the home run hitting contest.

No doubt American fans would get upset over such a change, and they’d have some legitimate reasons. As we’ve already seen with the openers in the Far East and Down Under, the time difference is a major problem. We can’t have All-Star Games being televised live back to the States at 4 a.m.

So that area of the world is out. But why not hold games in Central and South America or even western Europe?

The game could use the burst of energy our fellow Western Hemisphereans would give it. Crowds in London or Paris might be more reserved, but I guarantee the game would sell out. As for the time difference, an afternoon All-Star Game might not be a bad idea occasionally. We’ve raised a couple of generations of kids whose parents won’t let them stay up to see the end of the game, and how has that helped baseball?

Other sports have tried a format similar to USA vs. the World format before, including hockey (substitute North America for America). It hasn’t really caught on.

But Interleague play has rendered American League vs. National League meaningless. Making home field advantage in the World Series the prize hasn’t injected any life into it.

So why not pit America’s best against everyone else? After we get our butt kicked a few times, maybe we’ll start caring about baseball in America again. Or, if we adopt our World Cup standards, we’ll pat our lads on the back for not embarrassing us. Either way, we’ll be doing it as one.

Frankly, I really don’t care how this country would react to the changes I’m proposing. It is the rest of the world I want to get interested in baseball.

In order for Major League Baseball to thrive, it has to think outside its borders. But first, it should look within.

There is no ignoring the impact that international talent is having on the league today. Just look at the names as they are called off during tonight’s selection show.

It isn’t just the amount of talent that comes from abroad. It is how compelling that talent is. Ask the hardcore baseball fan (not just hardcore Red Sox, Yankees or Giants fan, hardcore baseball fan) what players they will pay to watch and the vast majority of them are not American.

Yasiel Puig, for all of his faults, is right up there with Mike Trout at the most electrifying players in the game. Fellow Cuban Jose Abreu, a rookie, leads the game in home runs. Miguel Cabrera is the best hitter of his generation, and fellow Venezuelan Jose Altuve has already made a case as the best under 5-foot-7 player ever, if only he could escape the obscurity of playing for the Houston Astros.

Thank goodness for the international pitchers, too. I mean, I love John Lester, but the guy is about as much fun to watch pitch as a pine tree. Masahiro Tanaka is the best pitcher in the American League — and not an idiot, regardless of what Mike Napoli thinks. Felix Hernandez continues to build his Hall of Fame resume. And anyone who doesn’t find Koji Uehara entertaining needs to drink a colonic.

There are countless others who are inspiring future generations of Cuban, Venezuelan, Dominican and Japanese baseball players. Baseball can’t take their American peers for granted, but it needs to lengthen the game’s global reach.

The World Baseball Classic, which is infinitely more popular in Latin America than it is here, was a good way to start. Turning the All-Star Game into an international event is the next step.

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