ANALYSIS : They May Be Scoreless Stars--Just Like 1967

What if they gave an All-Star Game and nobody scored?

Don’t laugh. It almost happened the last time baseball’s best players conducted their mid-season convention down the road from Disneyland.

Tuesday night’s renewal comes 22 years to the day after the All-Stars last gathered in Anaheim Stadium for the longest game in the history of the series. The Stars struggled 15 innings that afternoon and evening in a game finally settled by Tony Perez’ home run that gave the National League a 2-1 victory.

The key here is afternoon and evening.

Because of television’s desire to showcase the event in prime time, the 1967 All-Star Game began at 4:15 p.m., leaving batters squinting through the late afternoon California sun against some of the best pitchers in the game. It made hitting an adventure and the results were obvious in the box score.

There were a record 30 strikeouts, 17 by AL hitters, 13 by the NL. Ferguson Jenkins tied a record with six strikeouts in three innings of work. Gary Peters and Catfish Hunter each struck out four hitters, Peters in three innings and Hunter in five.

On a day where the offenses were all but invisible, where scoring rallies were non-existent, all the runs came on homers.

Rich Allen connected for the NL against Dean Chance in the second inning and Brooks Robinson tied it against Jenkins in the sixth. Then the teams played scoreless baseball for the next nine innings before Perez settled the issue against Hunter in the 15th.

Except for the three home runs, it was largely a three up-three down game. There were precious few scoring threats and the game is best remembered for the strikeouts, all those strikeouts.

The game was less dramatic than it was draining, stretching through 3 hours, 41 minutes of offensive futility. The setting sun and some talented pitchers completely neutralized the game’s best hitters.

Perhaps the most frustrated was Roberto Clemente, one of 16 Hall of Famers who dotted the two rosters. Clemente would win his fourth batting title that season, but you couldn’t tell from his performance in the All-Star Game. He singled in his first at-bat and then struck out the next four times against four different pitchers, setting a record.

“Those late afternoon and early twilight shadows made breaking pitches especially tough to follow,” he said at the time. “No wonder everybody was swinging at the wind.”

Not to mention the sun.

And those guys weren’t facing all-time strikeout king Nolan Ryan, who, at the age of 42, has won a spot on this year’s AL staff.

Tom Seaver, who pitched the last inning to get the save for the NL in the 1967 game, will be in the broadcast booth for NBC Tuesday night. He has a hunch that the hitters, swinging again in the California twilight, may be in for a not-so instant replay of the kind of frustrations the ’67 Stars experienced.

“I think it could be the same kind of game,” Seaver said. “I believe you will see a number of strikeouts early on.”

Seaver was a rookie that year on a veteran pitching staff that included Jenkins, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale. That left NL Manager Walt Alston with a surplus of Hall of Fame arms and it showed. The AL managed just eight hits, three of them by Carl Yastrzemski. The NL didn’t do much better, getting just nine hits against Chance, Jim McGlothlin, Peters -- who threw three perfect innings -- Al Downing and Hunter.

“Possibly, it was over-all the best pitching in any All-Star Game I’ve seen,” Alston said. “You’d have a hard time picking the best one.”

That game’s Hall of Fame contingent was a galaxy of some of baseball’s greatest stars -- Alston, Yastrzemski, Hunter, Drysdale, Clemente, Gibson, Marichal, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, Harmon Killebrew, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays and Lou Brock.

But the leading vote getter -- at that time All-Star balloting was done by the players, managers and coaches -- was Pittsburgh shortstop Gene Alley, who received 250 votes. Perhaps in recognition of his status, Alley was permitted to play the whole game. That, however, turned out not to be such a good idea. He went 0-for-5.

Alley had plenty of hitless company, though. Killebrew, Orlando Cepeda, and Tony Conigliaro were each 0-for-6. Bill Freehan was 0-for-5. Willie Mays, a non-starter for the first time since 1956, pinch-hit in the sixth inning, stayed in the game and went 0-for-4. Bill Mazeroski was 0-for-4 and Rod Carew and Dick McAuliffe were each 0-for-3.

The Anaheim game was second in a series of three where All-Star hitting was nearly entirely absent. The year before, in St. Louis, the NL won 2-1. The next year, in Houston, the score was 1-0. Pitching was king in those days and its dominance led to changes in the rules, a lowering of the mound and the eventual introduction by the American League of the designated hitter.

Even though the twilight affected the hitters, baseball has not hesitated to play subsequent west coast showcase games at that hour. The last California All-Star Game was in 1987 at Oakland, where the two leagues were scoreless for 12 innings before the NL won 2-0. All five of last year’s World Series games in Los Angeles and Oakland also had twilight starting times.

Television had the right idea, though. NBC research reported that a record 55 million people watched the 1967 All-Star Game, the largest audience ever for a non-World Series baseball game. The game had a rating of 25.6, representing more than one-quarter of the total TV sets in the country, and was viewed on 23,800,000 of the sets in operation at that time.

Now, 22 years later, with the advent of cable TV and VCR use reducing audiences across the board, NBC is estimating an audience of 45 million for Tuesday night’s game.