You Can’t Hit What You Can’t See

Some years ago, after an embarrassing multi-car collision at the start line of the Indianapolis 500 motor speedway race that put a third of the field out of the race, driver Dan Gurney was heard to observe bitingly: “You would think 33 of the world’s best drivers could manage to back their cars out of the garage successfully.”

Well, in the 58th major league All-Star game you would have thought that 56 of the greatest baseball players on the planet could have managed to score a run in under 3 hours 50 minutes and 13 innings. They couldn’t.

If you like scoreless ties, this was your cup of stale beer. It was an agony fight. As a television show, it was a test pattern. A wall-to-wall yawner. A somebody-wake-me-when-something-happens non-event.

Once there was a prizefight at which two guys danced just out of range all night, aiming light, ineffectual taps on the side of their respective heads until, finally, a large, fat party sitting at ringside could stand it no longer and he rose and bellowed: “Somebody knock somebody down!”

You had the feeling he would have had the same sense of outrage along about the ninth inning of Tuesday night’s All-Star game. It had all the thrills of a cribbage game in a firehouse, lawn bowling at Roxbury Park.

Nobody even got to third base till the ninth inning. One league had two hits up to that time, the other had four.

They could have played this game by mail.

This is supposed to be the year of the lively ball, the home run, the return of the hitter. This was the return of the foul tip. Back to the drawing board.

All-Star games, at best, are kind of recitals. Standings are not at stake, season records and in some cases not even salaries.

But, league esteems are at stake. And, All-Star games are fairly reliable litmus tests for the state of the art of baseball.

You have to understand this game was spawned in the midst of a period of deep inferiority complex on the part of the National League. It was a time when the older league not only felt inferior, it, in fact, was.

What had happened was that the other league had all the broad shoulders. It had the guys who with one swing of the bat could undo innings of painstaking work by the other philosophy.

It had the Ruth who, in the words of the journalist Heywood Broun, was mighty and did prevail. He had made obsolete a 50-year theory of baseball practice, he had de-mystified theories that baseball was a game of speed, condition, brains and cunning. He showed it could be played in a potbelly and hangover, so long as you were able to hit a ball high and far, the rest was waste motion.

The All-Star games validated his concepts. His team and his league were the monarchs of baseball. He personally won the first All-Star game with his home run, and his league won 12 of the first 16 All-Star games.

But, then, the pendulum swung in another direction. A different, old-fashioned concept of the game took over once again. Suddenly, speed, daring, hell-for-leather, larcenous baseball took over again.

The National League became superior again. It started to win All-Star games two-a-year. It won 19 out of 20 and 21 out of 23.

It was no secret why. The National League was the first to sign black players, and it signed more and the better. The new configurations of the ballparks, the carpets on the floor helped. But, all at once, the other league was known as “The Fat Man’s Loop” and “The Brother-In-Law League.” The National had all the aces. And the way to play them.

This was the year it was supposed to swing back. The All-Star game charts the sea changes in the grand old game, and the American League seemed to have the tides going for it. They went into the game with 11 guys with 20 or more home runs already, and they seemed ready to mark a renaissance.

Instead, they served up a pillow fight. There was never a ball that even had warning-track possibilities on it as Tuesday’s game rattled along inconclusively, and the best hitters in the game just waved at passing curveballs.

What had happened? Well, geography, for one. It had happened before. In 1967, the All-Star game came to Anaheim and the two teams struggled to 15 innings before they could break a 1-1 tie.

When they play the game in this time zone, they have to recast it for Eastern television, so it’s neither a day game nor a night game. It’s a crepuscular nightmare where the ball periodically becomes a rumor as it passes in and out of gloaming shadows. It’s like a card game in the dark, a crap shoot in someone’s hat. All baseball hitters are guess hitters but, in the twilight, guesswork becomes a lottery.

Or did you think all those pitchers suddenly turned into Walter Johnson and Sandy Koufax out there?

If they put the game back on the West Coast, maybe they should just dispense with the first 12 or 13 innings. Put up the requisite zeroes and wait till the sun has gone down in the Pacific and the lights make shadows on the infield and start the game then.

They used to say of Walter Johnson’s pitches, “You can’t hit what you can’t see,” and in the half-light of a Pacific sunset even journeymen’s pitches disappear.

The good news is, the return of Big Ball has been put on hold temporarily. That’s the nice thing about speed and running and hitting-’em-where-they-ain’t. It works just as well in half-light and makes Tim Raines more than the equal of Babe Ruth for a night.