When your city plays host to the All-Star Game, it becomes the capital of baseball for a few days. And, like any capital, it becomes a willing victim of pomp and pageantry, of events inflated to overshadow their utter lack of importance. The All-Star Game just played at Wrigley Field offered nothing profound and nothing of any real meaning. The game’s return, under the lights, after a 28-year banishment from Wrigley should have been a primer of how the game has changed with the dominance of television–how it’s become the tool of the medium, and not the other way around –but, aside from the rain delay being dragged out to accommodate network replacement programming and a small but irritating incident involving a Minicam crew atop a neighboring building (the light was a distraction to batters, halting play during the fourth inning), that was not the case. (The jinx of the Wrigley Field lights still exists, but it’s subsiding; after the first night game and the first opening-day night were both rained out, the first night All-Star Game at Wrigley fell victim to rain, but at least they managed to finish this time.)
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In any case, the All-Star Game endures as a collection of moments, as clashes of ego, as–to borrow from the soft-drink advertisement–an annual celebration of the classic (if meaningless) confrontation. To its credit, the 61st All-Star Game added to the canon a new moment that was almost sublime, involving as it did one of the game’s colossal egos in a delightful twist of managerial strategy. To say that the game’s highlight was an intentional walk might usually be an insult, but in the All-Star Game played earlier this month it was simply the fact of the matter–and a very good game it was.
Canseco is an awesome specimen of the modern-day athlete, with a body fully developed through weight training (for which he comes under attack from the more cynical fans and sportswriters as a possible user of steroids), with a talent for the game both defensive and offensive, and with the predictable frailties of a 26-year-old who’s at the top of his profession. (He has a fondness for fast cars and, less predictably, for leaving handguns sticking out noticeably from under their seats.) He may well be the best player in baseball; he is certainly the best power hitter. For this, he earns the largest salary, and he also attracts the most derision, which he invites by going hatless at All-Star workouts and with his large and uninhibited, truly Ruthian swing. He did not hit a single homer during the homer-hitting contest, but his at-bat was the second most entertaining, in that he put on a fearsome display of breezy whiffs and pop-ups hit high into the air like misguided mortar shots. Only Oakland’s Mark McGwire for the American League and San Francisco’s Matt Williams for the Nationals reached the fence, before Ryne Sandberg ended the contest in the bottom half of the anchor inning with a home run, then–unlike in real baseball–continued his inning until his outs were up, hitting two more homers and sending the fans into a frenzy.
