FanFest Organizers Top Last Year’s Effort : Baseball: Event can handle up to 150,000 participants beginning Friday.

While Major League Baseball was busy Wednesday releasing names of the starters for Tuesday’s All-Star game at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, workers were busy assembling the newest extravaganza to accompany the event . . . the Upper Deck All-Star FanFest.

In its second year alongside the midsummer exhibition, FanFest is preparing to handle as many as 150,000 participants during its Friday through Tuesday run at the San Diego Convention Center.

The festivities begin Friday at 8:30 a.m. with Ted Williams throwing out the first pitch. It runs daily, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.

There should be something for everyone, including a parking spot, according to Stu Upson, the vice president of Major League Baseball Properties, whose responsibility it is to pull this thing off.

Upson, during Wednesday’s hard-hat tour of the Convention Center, said his one major concern about the interactive theme park is that fans skip it.

“People would be missing out on something because it’s not coming back for a while,” Upson said. The FanFest makes one appearance annually in the All-Star game city.

Between 80,000 and 150,000 are expected to come from all of Southern California for the event. Last year’s attracted 70,000 to the 175,000-square-foot exhibit in Toronto. This year’s is bigger, more than 300,000 square feet, and, according to Upson, better.

At a projected cost of $2 million and with the hope of just breaking even, Major League Baseball is adding more of the most popular events and adding several new attractions.

Most popular last year were the Hall of Fame exhibit, the video batting cages, radar pitching games, the player-autograph area and the personalized baseball cards.

There is a “bigger is better” attitude this year. Instead of having only two batting cages as there were in Toronto, there are five. It should again be popular, providing participants an opportunity to bat against a major league pitcher’s image projected on a screen. The ball comes out of a hole in the the screen, typically 45-60 miles per hour.

“We didn’t eliminate anything from last year,” Upson said. “The improvements we made were operational. Actually, we were surprised at how well it went last year.”

There are 120 current and former players who will sign autographs--four at a time--in two-hour blocks over the five days, including Brooks Robinson, Dick Allen, Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, Ferguson Jenkins, Steve Garvey and Juan Marichal.

Among the other exhibits are a computer swing analysis, simulated clubhouse and dugout, the Diamond Theater, an arcade, minor league and world baseball exhibits, a play area for children and a food court featuring ballpark food from around the country.

Tickets are sold on a timed-entry basis, each hour on the hour, with a 3,000-person limit for any one-hour block.