Who won the Pro Bowl? How about the NBA All-Star Game? The NHL All-Star game?
Know? Care?
Do they have an NHL All-Star Game? Who plays?
Baseball is not without its problems — how would you like to be a Tampa Bay Devil Rays fan? — but not a one was evident during Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, a 5-4 American League victory that came down to the final pitch before a chilled-but-enthralled crowd of 43,965 at AT&T Park.
Arch Ward, the greatest sports editor in Tribune history, sure got it right back in 1933 when he came up with the idea of a midseason event to showcase baseball’s best talent in a head-to-head matchups in conjunction with Chicago’s Century of Progress Exhibition.
They have been doing it ever since, and it’s still a great attraction.
Best talent … head-to-head matchups … that’s supposed to be the objective of any sport’s all-star game. But come on, as astonishingly popular as pro football is, you could rattle off the name of a Republican mayor of Chicago easier than you could recall a memorable moment from a Pro Bowl.
The eye-popping glitz — or “pretty unusual stuff,” as its known in my ‘hood — of NBA All-Star weekend is an astonishing confluence of athletes, entertainers and “pretty unusual people,” but a participant who gave even a passing thought to playing defense would be branded a traitor, have his bling confiscated and never be invited back.
And no list of unforgettable NHL All-Star moments is complete without … well, I believe Eddie Shore was nearby, or maybe it was Gene Ubriaco.
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So 37-year-old Ken Griffey Jr. rifles an RBI single into center field off 23-year-old Dan Haren at Tuesday night and I’m thinking this is not only a great individual matchup, it’s generational. That was the mood of the evening, and it was established before the game when both teams gathered near the center field gate to greet Willie Mays, 76, and still the greatest Giant of them all.
It was a genuine Field of Dreams moment and, like the movie of the same name, it was a little hokey. But the crowd loved it, and the players seemed to draw on it, though only a handful of them were even alive when Mays wrote the manual on how to play a breath-taking center field.
David Wright made a diving stop to take a hit away from Alex Rodriguez … Vladimir Guerrero froze Jose Reyes at second with a one-hop laser beam to third from right field … A-Rod, the $26 million man, stole second with a headfirst slide, only to be nailed at the plate two batters later when Griffey proved there’s still life in that 37-year-old left arm.
They played that way because they care, all of them. The American League dugout resembled kids at Chuck E. Cheese after Ichiro Suzuki’s two-run, inside-the-park homer, an All-Star first, gave the visitors a 2-1 lead.
The scene was repeated when Cleveland’s Victor Martinez left the yard with a two-run shot off Met Billy Wagner for a 5-2 AL lead, but the National League wouldn’t go away, getting to 5-4 on Alfonso Soriano’s two-out, two-run homer in the ninth and then loading the bases before Aaron Rowand flied out to end it.
The AL’s unbeaten streak remains intact, but there was nothing easy about No. 11.
“It’s an unbelievable honor to be here,” NL starting pitcher Jake Peavy of the Padres had said beforehand. “And nobody wants to be embarrassed.”
Think those AL hitters weren’t embarrassed flailing away at Bruce Sutter’s unhittable splitters in the late 1970s? Even bad Cubs teams had some great players.
Poor Atlee Hammaker, a great guy and a decent pitcher, suffered a particularly cruel form of embarrassment when he gave up the only grand slam in All-Star history to Fred Lynn at the old Comiskey Park in 1983. I was covering Hammaker; truth be told I felt like consoling him.
At Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium 13 years later, the Cardinals’ Ozzie Smith was introduced as a late-game pinch hitter. Smith was to shortstop what Mays was to center field, and notoriously hard-edged Philly fans — the booing of Santa Claus is not an apocryphal tale — sensed they were getting their last look at a true great. They had a stadium-wide standing “O” under way before Smith stepped in.
Nice moment. All-Star history is full of them.
“It wasn’t the tie,” Commissioner Bud Selig said of the decision to award World Series home-field advantage to the winning All-Star league after the 2002 game ended in an unsatisfying 7-7 standoff. “I was getting a lot of complaints about a lack of intensity.
“I remember calling Ron Santo after one of his operations. He said, ‘The All-Star Game is ridiculous. When I played we took it seriously, but now guys are going home after three innings.’ So we put home field in, and the game has been played with more intensity.
“This is the best All-Star Game by far,” Selig said. “So why not try to restore the intensity?”
There was plenty to go around on Tuesday.
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