By the time the MLB All-Star Game stopped by the Murph in San Diego in 1992, I was so excited I nearly died. We went to FanFest. We got a program. We got autographs. We got souvenirs. We got a picture with Lou Brock. It was incredible.
But I wasn’t that excited for the game. I was Padres for life. I was National League for life. (I was five, don’t hold it against me.) And while sure, the next day we lost our minds watching the lineups introduced, we knew the NL would lose. For one thing, the Padres had three starters that year, Gwynn, McGriff and Santiago. Let’s be honest, if anything that was a bad omen. You can’t put three Padres in the starting lineup, even in San Diego. Who does that? Plus, the National League hadn’t won in four years. Sure enough, the AL beat the NL to a pulp that year, 13-6. Five straight. It felt like the NL would never win again.
Boy, was I right.
The National League ended up winning three games between 1994-96, and three between 2010-12, but uh, that’s it. The AL is 25-6-1 since 1988.
Ah, but they’ve needed to be that good to even things up—that only brings the AL to 43-41-2 overall. The National League went 33-8-1 between 1950-1987. A run like that doesn’t make any sense. They’re not the same players every year. Barely anyone in the ‘87 Midsummer Classic was even born in 1950! (Mike Schmidt started the game at age 38 and 10 months, incredibly. He was the fucking MVP in 1986! He was born in 1949!)
But it’s not statistical blasphemy or anything—if you’ve ever played roulette or yahtzee, you know it takes a hundred or so of something before the results start to even out the way they should. (Don’t get me started on the statistical meaninglessness of 16 NFL games.)
And why do we have a sample size of ninety MLB all-star games? Because the MLB invented the very idea of an all-star game, back in 1933. The World’s Fair was held in Chicago to celebrate the city’s centennial; sportswriter Art Ward helped organize a one-off baseball game full of the game’s stars as part of the festivities. Babe Ruth hit a bomb. It was a hit. They kept doing it.
Over the decades since, dozens of sports leagues around the world have created their own MLB style all-star games.
I was going to try to figure out if any all-star team had ever had a dynasty like the modern AL or mid-century NL, but it turns out the NBA’s twist on the all-star game isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. Major League Baseball’s all star format, which has remained the same since 1933—one league against the other—is completely unique. Just about every other league has tried multiple formats over the years, including not just the NBA, NHL and NFL, but also pretty much every baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, you name it league across the globe. The year before the Miracle on Ice, the NHL even replaced its all-star game with an NHL vs. USSR series (the NHL team was 23 Canadians and 3 Swedes but took place at Madison Square Garden as a sort of accords I guess.)
Those NHL uniforms aren’t the greatest. They look like the stand-in unis your players wear in a video game while you create your own custom ones. But they’re certainly better than these heaps of flaming garbage:
They’re terrible. But now that I know the uniqueness of the game’s format’s consistency among all-star games, the more I think it’s important to commemorate the game’s history.
The home run derby contestants looking superfly in brown-and-gold Padres-style uniforms a few years ago solidified my view that the brown had so return, they looked great—and they would have looked even better on the field for the game. Why not celebrate the best the host team’s history has to offer?
Or maybe you’d rather they honor the all-star game with the long-running tradition of wearing their own uniforms, that’s cool too. But the two leagues have a long history apart, the game has a long history of bringing them together, and I think the problem is the shittiness of the uniforms themselves. The idea of honoring tradition with uniforms that commemorate the game—especially instead of changing the format and wearing unis that say ‘Team Trout’ and ‘Team deGrom’ or something—is fun, and I hope they fix them next year before everyone abandons the idea for good.