Philadelphia ? The Philadelphia Phillies played the Texas Rangers on Tuesday night for the first time in team history, and there certainly must be someone who thought this was a good idea or something other than merely a flat, bland stretch in the long road of a baseball season.

For every interleague game that gets you an up-close look at Johnny Damon or Ichiro Suzuki, there are a half-dozen more that bring only Hank Blalock and Laynce Nix.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Blalock and Nix, who both play for the Rangers, in case you missed it, but there is simply no reason to give a good hoo-hah about them here.

With very few exceptions, interleague play, once a somewhat interesting novelty, has worn out its welcome. Perhaps it is time baseball went back to the sanctity of the two leagues and the wild notion that less might actually be more.

The biggest indictment of interleague play, which began with the 1997 season, is that Major League Baseball has never figured out a way to implement it fairly. Such a small matter has failed to interest the game’s front office, however.

After the 1994 lockout and the cancellation of the World Series that year, baseball’s brain trust was willing to try any and all gimmicks to lure back the fans it had driven away with sticks.

Rather than trust in the product they had – and find a way to impose some fiscal sanity on it – Bud Selig and the backroom boys went for the cheap thrill. They even had the audacity to invent annual “rivalries” they hoped would somehow take root, ignoring the fact that the game likes to nurture something so fragile over decades.

Maybe interleague play was a harmless idea in comparison with some other post-1994 fallout. Less damage has probably been done by it than by the pinball-ization of the game with juiced baseballs and juiced players. Everyone liked the home-run chases of the 1990s, so it was easy to look the other way and not question why it was happening. Now the game’s most precious records are nearly meaningless, and baseball pretends not to notice.

So, sure, compared with that, interleague play has been no worse than most ideas to save the game. It’s great, in fact, compared with the ongoing atrocity of the designated hitter. But it’s time to move on.

The game’s front office does have to answer for a situation in which – on “rivalry” weekends this year – the Phillies will have played the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, while the Florida Marlins will have played two series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Even though the Phillies beat the Orioles two out of three, this hardly seems equitable.

Baseball does not mind looking ridiculous, however. Everyone always complains about the schedule, is the front office response. Playing Baltimore and Boston rather than Tampa Bay is just one of those things.

“That part of it stinks, but you have to deal with it,” Phillies’ Randy Wolf said. “It is for the fans who want to see some of the other players, but there are also some minuses. It does take away a little bit from the All-Star Game and the World Series.”

It was once so special when players and teams from the two leagues met. Now it is an average Tuesday in Philadelphia.