Thirty-five

35 Years Ago 

There was a time when the All Star teams meant something. I remember my family was on our way to a trip at Deer Park Fun Land in Muskegon, Michigan, during the summer of 1983 when the All Star rosters were announced. I remember buying the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, and another paper just to read what the different columnists said about the teams and who should have made it and who shouldn't have.

Certainly, it was a different time. Television coverage was okay, newspaper coverage was pretty good (for what our expectations were), and there was no Internet or any other such coverage. This was the era when I looked forward to the Sunday paper just to read all of the statistics.

Today, the All Star game is really worthless. I feel terrible saying that because I love baseball. The inter–league games have lessened the value and intrigue of the All Star game because baseball's biggest stars are often on the same field at the same time. Also, with so much coverage on television, there is rarely a day that one cannot watch a ballgame. While this is an incredible thing, it takes away a great deal of intrigue. Back when you could only see Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, and Gary Carter once in a while, baseball on TV was a different beast. Finally, the proliferation of statistics in many different forms has also had an impact on fandom. It's phenomenal all of the information we have about every single player, but it numberizes the game in a way that is lackluster at best. And this is coming from someone who bought one of the early copies of the stat books that changed the game. Hey, I'm an English major, not math …

Anyhow, I'm not excited about the game any longer. I am glad that so many former Detroit Tigers are playing in it for other teams. It says a lot when Dmitri Young, er, Joe Jimenez is your only representative. I remember some of the Tigers reps back in the '90s and early '00s. Now, that was an era best forgotten.