All-Star Associations

At least for me, sports becomes less relevant as I age. Don’t get me wrong, I still check scores often. When my hometown baseball team visited Washington, D.C., last month, I attended all 3 games. Still, I didn’t see a down of last year’s Super Bowl and that fact didn’t bother me. In sum, sports is no longer at the center of my existence as it was when I was a kid.

Yet, one associates televised events with moments in life and some of them retain a treasured place. As a very young boy, I remember still watching the 1968 baseball All-star game with my father.

Looking over accounts of that game I’m ashamed to admit I don’t remember players from my boyhood team, the Mets, playing in that contest, although they did. Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Jerry Grote represented a team that would finish 9th in the National League (no playoffs in those days) and lose 89 games. Yet that was a major improvement over the team’s previous futility and a sign of a miracle season to come.

In my mind’s eye, though, I can still see Harmon Killebrew of the Minnesota Twins stretching mightily for a throw at first base and strained a muscle. He had to come out of the game. “I heard it snap like a rubber band,” Killebrew would say later of his hamstring. Of course, as a kid, I remember Killebrew because of his name, which I thought sounded like the name of a tough guy, a killer.

I remember the Oakland A’s pitcher John “Blue Moon” Odom pitching in that game. What an odd name, I remember thinking. Sounds like odor. I also remember his white shoes, which the A’s introduced to baseball.

When I entered my early teens I also entered a period of about 7 years where I never saw another All-Star game. I attended or worked at summer sleep-away camps and the ones I was at didn’t own televisions. They were nice camps, sports, lakes, cookouts, the works. Why no TVs? It’s a cliche, but it was a different time. Cable was in its infancy. ESPN was 10 years away from being born. Although I don’t know this for a fact, I can’t imagine camps today without televisions. I’d guess that plenty of camps probably have multiple TVs, some are HD sets, I’d guess.

That’s why I always try to catch at least a few innings of the All-Star Game, as I will tonight on Fox. Whether or not it’s a good game, it represents a piece of forbidden fruit that reminds me of 1968, Killebrew, Odom, my father and a different time.