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Baseball’s All-Star Game began losing ground in 1959, the first of four straight seasons in which two games were played. The extra revenue was supposed to benefit the players’ pension fund, but a game that’s played simply to raise money is an exhibition game. The poor fans had thought up till then that the All-Star Game was played to establish league supremacy, or settle bragging rights, or something. It wasn’t an exhibition for the only reason that any sporting event isn’t an exhibition — because in the heads of the public, and the players, it mattered.
The game deserved the fearsome Pujols striding to the plate with everything on the line. An all-star game that isn’t about that kind of drama isn’t about anything at all. It would hardly have mattered a day or two later whether Pujols homered or struck out. The point is he would have been standing there, waving his bat, while across the stadium in San Francisco and in taverns across America, a hush fell. What would he do?
