All-Stars
On July 14th
baseball will celebrate the 93rd anniversary of the first All-Star Game to be
held in Philadelphia. Here Randall Sullivan recounts the history of how the
first All-Star game came to be along with digressions about the history of
baseball, the Great Depression, The Negro Leagues, Franklin Roosevelt, Chicago politics,
and the gangsters of the 1930’s. As a kid growing up in the 1950’s, I ate, drank,
and slept baseball. I read all kinds of sanitized books about the early years
of baseball and the great players of that era.
As Sullivan notes,
the origin of the first All-Star game in 1933 had its roots in the Chicago
Tribune and its sports editor, Arch Ward. With the country in depression there
was a special need to hype up the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The idea came to
Ward to have the “game of the century” that would feature the best players in the
National and American leagues playing against each other with the players to be
selected by a vote of the fans. To pull this event off it required the support
of both league presidents, the Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the Commissioner of
Baseball, Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly, and the support of President Roosevelt.
It worked and it all
came together with Connie Mack, the manager of the then Philadelphia Athletics,
and John McGraw, the manager of the then New York Giants piloting each team of
all-stars. Of course, the great Babe Ruth played for the American League and
let his team to a 4-2 victory with a home run.
I learned much about
the players of that era. They weren’t quite the all-American choir boys, except
for the great Lou Gehrig, they were portrayed in the books that I read those
many years ago. For example, instead of coming out of an orphanage to play
baseball, Babe Ruth was in reform school. He also had a gluttonous taste for
food, booze, and women. He was a customer of brothels in every American League
city. Nevertheless, after a night of carousing, he was still among the greatest
of all time on the field and at bat.
My quarrel with the
book is that Sullivan goes off on to many tangents that can lose the reader’s
interest. Nevertheless, he tells a story of how baseball captured America’s
imagination in the 1920’s with Babe Ruth along with Charles Lindberg being the
two great celebrities of the Roaring 20’s.
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