All-Star Game expands beyond humble beginnings of the ’30s

Arch Ward and the rest of the folks who put on the first All-Star Game in 1933 never could have envisioned all of this. They did not even envision a 1934 All-Star Game, let alone a weeklong extravaganza with a concert, parade, portable theme park and Home Run Derby.

As a matter of fact, those of us who were around in the 1970s could not have conjured the spectacle that the baseball All-Star Game has become.

“Long before I was involved in baseball, I went to the game in 1975 in Milwaukee,” said Bob DuPuy, the president and chief operating officer of Major League Baseball. “There was a pregame party in a tent outside the ballpark and a postgame party at the hotel. It was a four-hour deal.”

Now the All-Star drumbeat begins somewhere around Memorial Day with talk about voting for the starting lineups. This year, it will crest with a more pronounced drumbeat, at a Bon Jovi concert in Central Park tied in with the game Tuesday at Yankee Stadium.

The All-Star Game has become a sprawling show, with its own nationally televised selection show. It still is considered the halfway point of the baseball season, even though it is well past the 81st game. Although TV ratings have slipped substantially in the past 30 years, baseball’s Midsummer Classic remains the granddaddy of all all-star games, the heir to the game invented by Ward, the Chicago Tribune sports editor, as part of Chicago’s World’s Fair 75 years ago.

It still is a special rite of summer (the NHL usually releases its upcoming schedule the day after the baseball All-Star Game because there’s nothing going on). The All-Star Game is a big show, and getting bigger by the year.

“It has gone from a one-day celebration of the best players in baseball to a full-week celebration of the best players in baseball, the game of baseball itself and the community in which the All-Star Game is being played.”

“It’s attributable to the growth of sports in general and the fact sports and entertainment have kind of converged,” said Marla Miller, MLB’s senior vice president for special events, who has worked on 18 All-Star Games.

No one had to drop any reminders about what community is the host this year. For maybe the first time, the site is going to trump the players, what with the Midsummer Classic’s being held as part of the final-season tribute to Yankee Stadium.

Still, no matter where they hold Ward’s brainchild, it is huge. The All-Star Game, with its FanFest and Home Run Derby, has taken on some of the flavor of a Super Bowl and NBA Slam Dunk competition. At the same time, it still is distinctly baseball, with more lore than all the other all-star games combined – from Carl Hubbell’s feat of consecutively striking out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin in 1934 to Ichiro Suzuki’s inside-the-park home run last year.

“I think we’re held to a very high standard,” Miller said. “I believe we’re the No. 1 sport in the fabric of America. People feel very, very strongly and passionately about baseball in a way that they don’t about other sports.”

They just don’t tune in the way they did during the 1960s through 1980s.

“There weren’t 400 channels back then,” Miller said.

Baseball officials point out the Home Run Derby is ESPN’s top-rated show every summer.

What baseball’s advocates like best about the Midsummer Classic is what Tom Lasorda said about it: “It’s a great game.”

At its peak, it always has resembled a genuine game more than all-star contests in other sports do. Lasorda, who has a 3-1 record as National League manager in All-Star Games, said the part he liked most about his first one, as a coach in 1977 (hosted by Yankee Stadium), was the spirit.

“All the great players, like Joe Morgan, would come out of the game, they’d go to the clubhouse and put their sweatshirts on, and they’d come back out to the dugout and root for the team. They wanted to win it for their league,” Lasorda said.

When he came out of retirement for a night to coach third base for Bobby Valentine in the 2001 game, he did not see the same atmosphere.

“A lot of the guys just left early,” said the man who upstaged everyone in Seattle that night when he was bowled over by the barrel of Vladimir Guerrero’s broken bat.

The game reached a low competitive ebb a year later when managers Joe Torre and Bob Brenly ran out of pitchers and the game ended in a tie at 7. Lasorda likes the subsequent rule that gives home-field advantage in the World Series to the league that wins the All-Star Game.

“I always told the guys, ‘We want to win. I might not use all of you, but you’re still all-stars,’ ” said Lasorda, who will be at the Stadium Tuesday.

He remembers that 1997 game and standing alongside Sparky Anderson and Danny Ozark, his fellow former Dodgers farmhands.

During the national anthem, Anderson turned to the other two and said, “Wow, look at us. We’ve come a long way.”

So has the All-Star Game.