Winning Game Takes Back Seat to Beating Heat

It’s not The Ballpark, it’s the humidity, as the locals here are fond of saying, between desperate gasps for air and life-saving gulps of water.

The Ballpark in Arlington is a great place to host an All-Star game, assuming the intent is to make it the last All-Star game. Before Florida’s Jeff Conine took mercy on the crowd and his colleagues by delivering his eighth-inning tie-breaking home run, you half-feared the next-day headlines would read: “NL OUTLASTS AL, EIGHT PLAYERS TO SEVEN.”

As theater, Tuesday’s exercise wasn’t bad: Hideo Nomo opening with a blur and Conine closing up with a crash and a boom, with the National League managing three hits--all of them over the outfield fence--and squeezing out its second consecutive victory, 3-2. But as athletic competition, this was swamp survival training disguised as nine innings.

How do you see a baseball when your eyeballs are bobbing in sweat?

How do you catch a baseball when your Oakleys are melted to your face?

When Nomo turned his first corkscrew and delivered his first pitch to Kenny Lofton, the announced temperature was 96 degrees.

At 7:32 in the evening.

This was a break in the weather, the All-Stars agreed, after Monday’s three-hour workout and home run derby, which was conducted amid conditions best suited for a microwave burrito--114 on the field. Prior to this, from noon to 2 o’clock, the brains behind Major League Baseball--the same people who last year gave you an “expanded” playoff format that featured no playoffs and no World Series--decided to hold its Legends game, which would qualify as cruelty to codgers if there were any laws in this town.

(In that one, the American Leaguers held off the National Leaguers and the paramedics, 1-0.)

While sportswriters fought for cups of ice and wrapped cold towel compresses around their necks in the non-air-conditioned auxiliary press box, the players did their best to keep their business to balls and strikes, avoiding the strokes if they could.

How hot was it?

It was so hot that managers Felipe Alou and Buck Showalter pulled their starting pitchers after two innings, instead of the customary three. This deprived North America and eastern Asia of the kind of heat that can be enjoyable to watch--Nomo’s sweltering forkball versus Randy Johnson’s withering fastball. Both pitchers faced six batters, struck out three of them and allowed no runner to crawl beyond first base. It could have been one for the ages, had it only been 88 degrees or so.

Nomo was asked afterward if he was disappointed the duel in the dusk hadn’t lasted longer. Nomo winced. “No,” he replied through an interpreter, “this was just fine, thank you.”

It was so hot, the National League mustered the strength for only three hits, but turned them all into instant runs. Solo home run by Craig Biggio in the sixth inning, breaking up the no-hitter. Solo home run by Mike Piazza in the seventh inning, nullifying American Leaguer Frank Thomas’ two-run shot in the fourth. And, benevolently, solo home run by Conine to lead off the eighth, which earned him a personal and heartfelt thank you from a crimson-faced Biggio because “We’d still be playing if he didn’t hit it.”

Three hits, three home runs and it was into the cold showers for everyone.

“We were taken back by the Texas heat,” Conine explained, “so we conserved our energy. Three swings. That’s all we needed.”

After the fact, Conine insisted “the heat was no problem. I play in Miami; this is nothing to me. I play in this every day.” Of course, his head was spinning as he said it. From unknown Marlin to All-Star MVP with one cut as a late-inning pinch-hitter--anyone would be a little dizzy.

Biggio, who’s been around longer than Conine and has played in All-Star games where he didn’t see babbling brook mirages in center field, called the conditions playable “once the sun went down. But before, during batting practice, it was unbearable. I play in Texas, but I play indoors. And after going through something like this, that makes me glad.”

Biggio had just beaten the American League, but he looked as if he had just beaten a flock of buzzards. Stripped to his waist, he was late for a meeting with a frosty shower spray. Along the way, someone asked him how he was feeling.

“I feel OK now,” he replied, “but I only played five innings. If I’d gone nine, it’d be a different story.”

Alou was simply glad to have gotten it in.

“We played an All-Star game,” he announced as if it were a true accomplishment, and in a way, it was. “Remember, there had been rumors that the players might boycott this game.

“We played an All-Star game, the stadium was full and it was a good game. The could help the fans get interested again. Next step, we need to play a World Series. I believe we will. When we do, we’ll be out of the woods.”

It seems like so little to ask. Play an All-Star game. Play a World Series. But this is baseball in the mid-90s. Life is more complicated. Once upon a time, the players needed the fans to pay their salaries. Tuesday, they needed the fans in the dugout, plugged in and whirring, just to get them through the night.