Ray Ratto
San Fransisco Chronicle
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The flyover before the start of the 78th Annual All-Star Game.
The American League benefits again from the annual running of the All-Star Game, even though the extra home game has never actually come into play. True, an untidy little detail in the "This One Counts" campaign Bud Selig is so proud of, but hey, it's more dignified than "Loser Buys The Beer."
But when the tale of the 78th All-Star Game is actually told (after this morning, that is), the real winner will be the ballpark. Not the Americans, who had 5 to the Nationals' 4, or the Japanese, who emitted the game's most valuable player in Ichiro Suzuki, or the Venezuelans, who provided us with the ultra-nasty Johan Santana, or the Dominicans, whose Alfonso Soriano scared the AL with his ninth-inning home run.
The park. That monument to cellular communication technology and the impermanent nature of stadium naming rights. Old PBSBCATT Park, the Giants' ongoing tribute to bank financing.
Oh, the crowd got a glorious game, and the nation got three hours' entertainment that the July rating period does not normally provide. The bottom of the ninth inning alone was delicious in its tension, drama and execution, right down to the inevitable semi-informed second-guess (what, no Albert Pujols?). The city brought the setting, and the game brought the heat.
But the brightest star was the hall itself. It came into play at four pivotal moments in the game, and offered two more episodes of amusement/amazement, and if you need more than that to kill an evening, you are destined to (and richly deserve) a life of desperate dullness.
The five lesser events were as follows:
-- Carlos Beltran's long drive off the lower part of the right field inset just left of the 365-foot sign ricocheted back toward right field when Vladimir Guerrero was racing toward center to cut the ball off.
-- Carl Crawford's sixth-inning home run off Francisco Cordero, made possible by a fan leaning over the right-center field overhang and catching a ball that might well have fallen short. If the game really counted, Tony La Russa would have raced out to raise considerable hell with either second base umpire Mike Winters or right field umpire Bill Miller, and might even have become the first manager to be ejected from an All-Star Game.
-- Victor Martinez's line drive two-run homer in the eighth off Billy Wagner, hit right down the left-field line and in such a way that it probably would not have gone out at any other part of the park, not even over the annoying car cutouts.
-- Jose Reyes' double off the lip of the third-base cutout that baffled Alex Rodriguez to lead off the third inning. Reyes didn't score, but the look on Rodriguez's face as he watched the ball turn 75 degrees left was a keeper.
-- Freddy Sanchez's long run down the left-field line to make a tumbling catch in foul ground off Justin Morneau. Sanchez tumbled because he hit the bullpen cutout, one of only two sets left in major-league baseball (the two here and the two at Wrigley Field).
But the signature moment was Suzuki's fifth-inning home run, the one that earned him the free car and might help prod the Mariners to complete the rumored five-year, nearly $100 million contract extension with him.
He lined an 87-mph slider off Chris R. Young toward the Mirabelli Alley gap in right-center, but the ball struck the corner of the inset padding of the sixth archway - or the third archway if you, unlike Jon Miller, count left to right rather than right to left.
The pad was hidden by an All-Star Game vinyl banner, but it was not substantial enough to prevent the ball from shooting toward right field, giving Griffey no chance to react. Suzuki, at a dead sprint from the time he left the batter's box, raced home standing with his first inside-the-park home run ever in either North America or Asia, and the first in All-Star Game history.
"I thought it was going to go over the fence," Suzuki said, "and when it didn't, I was really bummed."
Only for a minute, though, for it turned out to be a far better moment as it was. Remember it? People at Tuesday night's game will be telling their grandchildren about it, even after the Giants begin stumping for a new park on Russian Hill because American Telepathy and Telemetry Park will be old and decayed. The ball and Suzuki's hat are going to the Hall of Fame, to be followed in due course by Ichiro himself, we must assume.
Even small things, like the frantic managing done by Jim Leyland (who had only one position player not make an appearance) and La Russa (the first manager in All-Star history to ever use one pitcher per inning for an entire game) made the chaos of a 64-player All-Star Game seem almost rhythmic.
The game reminded us that all the things we say we want to see beforehand are rarely as good as the surprise endings. Barry Bonds flied to right and put one to the warning track in left before leaving in the fourth, hitless let alone homerless, but the game far exceeded any disappointment the fans might have felt from that. They got to give their guy an extended standing ovation on national television, plus the very cool gesture of him handing Willie Mays' jacket to Griffey won him some charm points with the flint-hearted nation at large.
If any Ranger, White Sox or Royal or fans who felt cheated that Michael Young, Bobby Jenks and Gil Meche didn't get to play, well, please. If Twins fans fume that Torii Hunter came out in the ninth inning as part of a double switch, know that Leyland didn't like it either: "I didn't enjoy (managing the game) a bit. I enjoyed it about five minutes ago, and I'm dead serious about that."
And if anyone thinks the All-Star Game cannot stand alone without gimmicks like home-field advantage, or the interminable seventh-inning stretch for "God Bless America," well, shame on you for being rubes. On this night, the game did fine, the city did swell and the park did best of all. There is nothing more to be asked.
This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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