Last Time the Stars Came Out in Washington D.C.

NOW A DECAYING HULK, the ballpark was then just eight years old. It's summer residents, the Washington Senators, were winning at last. Two days earlier, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had walked on the moon. It was party time in the nation's capital and Major League Baseball's best and brightest were coming.

You gotta have balls to play in the nation's capital

The date: July 23, 1969. The event: MLB's 40th All Star Game.  It would be Washington's fourth such affair and its last for nearly half a century. And it couldn't have come at a worse time for the host American League.

It was a time of National League dominance, the likes of which the mid-summer classic had never known. The so-called senior circuit had won each of the last six contests, 12 of the previous 15 and held an overall 21-17-1 advantage since the event's inception in 1933.

This sides for this outing at recently rechristened Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium were decidedly lop. Thirteen NL players were destined for the National Baseball Hall of Fame, five were in the starting lineup including pitcher Steve Carlton and catcher Johnny Bench. The AL squad had just six, battery not included.

Rain had postponed the match for a day. Now, with Richard Nixon off to welcome the astronauts home from Tranquility Base, Vice President Spiro Agnew thew out the first ball. Maybe they should have left him in.

The New York Yankees' Mel Stottlemyre started for the Americans. He immediately yielded a single to the Pittsburgh Pirates' Matty Alou, who'd bat .331 that year. Alou moved to second on ground out by the Chicago Cubs' Don Kessinger. He went to third on a wild pitch, then scored when hometown hero Frank Howard misplayed Hank Aaron's shot to left.

One hot dog and two Franks

The bottom of the first saw the AL send up a gold-plated trio: Rod Carew, Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson. Hall of Famers all. Carlton set them down in order.

Cleon Jones of the New York Mets led off the second with a single. Bench's two-run belt brought him home. In the bottom of the frame, the 6'7" Howard -- aka the Washington Monument, aka The Capital Punisher -- took Lefty deep for shot of redemption. NL 3, AL 1 after two.

Any good feeling in the home dugout quickly dissipated.

Aaron started the third with a hit off the Oakland A's Blue Moon Odom. Then Cooperstown-bound Willie McCovey homered. An out, an error, a single and two doubles later, the National League had three more runs. Though Detroit Tigers catcher Bill Freehan replied with a solo shot, McCovey cracked his second round-tripper an inning later, this one served up by the Tigers' Denny McLain.

When Freehan's single -- off the peerless Bob Gibson -- drove in pinch runner Reggie Smith in the 4th, the game still had the look of slugfest. The Nationals had three homers and nine runs. The Americans had two taters and three runs. And the game wasn't half over.

Except that it was.

Both sides combined for just three hits the rest of the way, no more than one in any single frame. The Cleveland Indian's Sam McDowell, aka Sudden Sam, fanned four in two innings of work. He was one of three AL hurlers to hold the NL at bay.

Baseball and a tax break

The game ended with that same 4th inning score, 9-3. Knucksie Phil Niekro, he of 318 career wins, got the save.

Some of the senior circuit's gaudiest stars were relegated to just bit parts. Willie Mays pinch hit and skied to right. Ernie Banks pinch hit and lined out. In his lone plate appearance, Roberto Clemente fanned. Pete Rose, destined to be baseball's all-time hits leader and then a Hall of Fame pariah, popped out.

Tom Seaver, in the midst of a 25-win Cy Young Award season, never pitched.

Each of the junior circuit's future Hall inductees, including Carl Yastrzemski, Harmon Killebrew and Brooks Robinson, went hitless.

McCovey, with his two homers and three runs batted in, was the game's most valuable player. By season's end, with a .320 average, 45 homers and 126 RBIs was the league's MVP too.

Cleon Jones hit .340 -- third best in the NL behind Rose, .348 and Clemente, .345 -- and caught the final out as the Miracle Mets won the World Series, 5 games to 1, over the Baltimore Orioles. It was their first winning season since their birth in 1962.

Bench and McCovey - two for the Hall

In between the mid-summer classic and the miracle, there would be "Vietnamization" of the war in southeast Asia, the Manson Family murders, Hurricane Camille and Woodstock.

The host Senators, managed by Ted Williams -- aka the Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame and Ted Fucking Williams -- were never better, posting an 86-76 record. It would be their only winning season in 11 Washington campaigns.

By 1972, they were gone, relocated to Arlington, Texas, as the Rangers.

Having previously lost the original Senators franchise (sometimes confusingly called the Nationals) to Minnesota, the District of Columbia was left pining for a team to call it's own for 34 years.

In 2005 it got one, the Montreal Expos. They called RFK Stadium their home for three years before moving into the brand new Nationals Park. There the stars will come out again on Tuesday night.

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Before Bull Durham, There Were The Durham Bulls

WHEN THE LEGEND BECOMES FACT, print the legend -- baseball edition.

"... about America's other favorite pastime."

Bull Durham, a fictional story about the minor league Durham Bulls, opened in U.S. theaters 30 years ago this week and immediately took its place in the pantheon of great baseball movies alongside The Babe Ruth Story, Pride of the Yankees and The Natural.

Within the next five years came Eight Men Out, Field of Dreams, Major League, A League of Their Own and The Sandlot. Baseball was boffo at the box office and Bull Durham led the charge.

Directed by one-time minor leaguer Ron Shelton, the film got a great many things right about the low rent, high fun MiLB universe: its rites, rituals, goofy mascots and promotions and the fans who took their transient players to heart and sometimes to bed.

In it Kevin Costner played Crash Davis, a career minor league slugger and sage acquired by the Bulls to tutor idiot bonus baby, pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins. Susan Sarandon was their sensuous bohemian mutual love interest, Annie Savoy. Costing $7 million to make, it grossed more than $50 million at the box office and embedded itself in pop culture history.

The movie's anniversary will be feted this season in diverse places such as Helena, Montana and Framingham, Massachusetts and at minor league ballparks in Fargo, North Dakota, St. Paul, Minnesota, Asheville, North Carolina and Woodbridge, Virginia.

Dirty Al Gallagher, 1981 program coverboy

It's almost enough to make one forget the Durham Bulls were and are a real baseball team, one that existed long before the movie that made them so well known. Among their alumni, hall of famer Joe Morgan, sluggers Rusty Staub, Ken Singleton and Greg Luzinski plus 1972 National League Rookie of the Year Jon Matlack.

But, nine years before the movie, they didn't exist at all.

The Bulls, for all intents and purposes, had gone extinct after the 1971 season, having spent their last two years without a major league affiliation. Before that, they'd been the Carolina League farm club of the Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets and Houston Colt 45's. Their once and future home, the Durham Athletic Park, had gone to seed.

Enter entrepreneur Miles Wolff, a man who would go on to found and/or lead entire minor leagues. In the dilapidated DAP , he had a vision. It would ultimately entail sod, paint, elbow grease and a manager named Alan Mitchell Edward George Patrick Henry Gallagher, also known as Dirty Al.

Resurrected for the 1980 season as a Class A affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, they took the field  before 4,591 fans, wearing spandex uniforms designed by Universal Studios and boasting a roster studded with future big league players including Brett Butler, Gerald Perry, Milt Thompson, Albert Hall, Rick Behenna and Joe Cowley.

The Greatest Show on Dirt

Also present, a struggling 24-year-old catcher/first baseman named Brian Snitker, who would soon hang up his spikes and turn to coaching. In 2016 -- at the age of 61 -- he became the Braves' manager.

The Bulls endured the theft of their home uniforms and their bus getting stuck in the mud, but ultimately drew 176,000 fans to the gussied up old ballpark built in 1926 and compiled an 84-56 record, good for a spot in the Carolina League championship series, which they lost to the Phillies' Peninsula Pilots, three games to none.

The Bulls were boffo in Durham. For their efforts, they were awarded the 1981 Carolina League All Star Game and more Braves prospects, among them pitcher Jeff Dedmon and outfielder Brad Komminsk, the fourth overall pick in the 1979 amateur draft. He would bat .322 that year with 33 homers and 104 runs batted in. He even swiped 35 bases.

The prospects, courtesy of Chick-Fil-A.

Despite his heroics, the Bulls slipped to fourth place in the composite standings. Dirty Al's second season at the helm in Durham would be his last, though he'd spend the better part of the next two decades managing minor league teams in far flung places including Chattanooga and Bend, Oregon, San Jose, Duluth and Kansas City, Kansas.

The Bulls' popularity would only grow. Wolff, in a 2017 interview, recounted his team's early support from former Universal Pictures president Thom Mount, a Durham native. Upon visiting the ballpark, Mount told Wolff, "some day we'll make a movie," a remark the entrepreneur said he'd dismissed as "Hollywood talk."

Six years later, Mount dispatched Shelton to the Durham Athletic Park to soak up the atmosphere.

When the stars came out the DAP

"We were sure it was going to be a huge flop," Wolff said. It wasn't and ever since, the Bulls have been boffo everywhere. In 1990, they became the first Class A team to draw more than 300,000 fans in a season. Then Wolff cashed out, selling his team to the local Capitol Broadcasting Company.

Five years later, the club moved into a new stadium, the 10,000-seat Durham Bulls Athletic Park. In 1998, they were elevated to the Triple-A International League as the top farm club of the then-expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

In a move that can only be described as life imitating art imitating life, on June 15, the Bulls will wear Bull Durham throw back jerseys for their own 30th Anniversary celebration of the movie they made possible, which in turn made them famous.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Wayne Gretzky Ruins the Islanders' All Star Affair

ADD TO WAYNE GRETZKY'S long list of accomplishments this: he was a rotten guest.

The occasion was the 35th National Hockey League All Star Game, being held for the first time at Long Island's Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the place the best team in hockey called home.

The National Hockey League's best
 come to Long Island

It turned out to be a rather unhappy affair for the locals, thanks in no small part to number 99.

It's not like he put a lampshade on his head, danced on the buffet table, then barfed in the punch bowl. This was more akin to wearing the same dress as the hostess, but looking way hotter.

It was Feb. 8, 1983 and the old barn was spruced up as much the built-on-a-budget concrete and cinderblock arena could be. Four members of the three-time reigning cup champion New York Islanders and their coach, Al Arbour, were on hand to greet The Great One and his Campbell Conference confreres.

Welcome to our house... May we take your coats?

Unlike today's All Star game, which is a couple of players short of a team and edges ever closer to sneaker-wearing players slapping an orange ball across a gym floor with plastic sticks, this mid-Winter classic was a true showcase for the creme de la creme of la Ligue Nationale de Hockey.

Then as now the LNH was split into two conferences, each consisting of two divisions. All of those groupings were named in honor of figures from the league's illustrious past, leaving all but the most dedicated fans in the dark about geographic points of origin. The eastern conference was named for the Prince of Wales, while the west honored a commoner, long-time league president Clarence Campbell.

Half the 20-man Wales all-stars were future hockey hall of famers: Mike Bossy, Denis Potvin and Bryan Trottier of the Islanders, the Bruins' Ray Bourque, Hartford's Ron Francis, Quebec's Michel Goulet and Peter Stastny, Philly's Mark Howe and Darryl Sittler and Washington's Rod Langway.

Though the Campbell Conference roster had ol' TGO, it actually seemed a bit less imposing. Accompanying the Edmonton Oilers' captain were teammates Mark Messier, Jari Kurri and Paul Coffey, Chicago Blackhawks stars Denis Savard, mustachioed Calgary Flames gunner Lanny McDonald and Los Angeles Kings center Marcel Dionne.

Though augmented by the incumbent Norris Trophy winner, Blackhawks defenseman Doug Wilson, they had an apparent problem in goal.

While Chicago's Murray Bannerman started the game, his intended alternate, the Vancouver Canucks' Richard Brodeur had sustained an ear injury days earlier, leaving the Campbells short of a net minder and the Canucks without a representative (each team got at least one).

So Brodeur's Vancouver backup, John "Cheech" Garrett -- acquired just days earlier from the Nordiques -- became the Canucks' designated star. He'd have stolen the show, but for ostentatious number 99, flaunting his... you know... talents.

Here's how that went down.

Quebec's Goulet opened the scoring early in the first period, with an assist from fellow Nordique Peter Stastny (whose son, Paul, now plays for the St. Louis Blues). Eight minutes later, Winnipeg Jets defenseman David Babych answered back, tying the game with aid from Mustache and the Blue's Brian Sutter. At 19:01, the Bruins Bourque un-tied it and the teams ended the opening segment with the score: Wales 2, Campbell 1.

Polite company. Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres for everyone.

Early in the second, Minnesota North Star Dino Ciccarelli got the equalizer, with help from fellow North Star Neal Broten and the Blackhawk's Al Secord.

For some, a night to remember. For others, to forget... quickly

Midway through, starting goalies Bannerman and Pete Peeters were swapped out. Garrett came on for the Campbells and the Flyers' Swedish net minder Pelle Lindbergh, just 23 and in his first full NHL season, took over for Wales. Then, North Star Tom McCarthy put the west ahead with assists from Ciccarelli and the Blackhawks' Bob Murray.

Campbell 3, Wales 2 after two.

Rumaki anyone? A bite-sized quiche perhaps? What was that noise in the other room?

In the third period, the guests became unruly. Uncouth.

Gretzky, held off the scoresheet for more than 45 minutes, scored with assists from Kurri and Coffey (or perhaps curry and coffee) at 6:20. McDonald added a goal, from Sutter and Dionne, pushing the margin to 5-2 a minute later. Then Gretzky struck again, with help from Messier and Kurri.

"Dude, that was totally awesome!"
Gretzky and Kurri yuk it up.

Guests 6, hosts 2.

New York Rangers forward Don Maloney -- who years later would serve as the Islanders' general manager -- answered back with help from New Jersey Devils delegate Hector Marini. It was a last stab at respectability at 14:04 and it would not last.

The final 5:56 would be pure humiliation on the order of hitting on the host's date in front of everyone and then leaving with her. It was that bad.

Gretzky scored again at 15:32, his third goal in nine minutes, with assists from Wilson and Messier, and he wasn't done. Toronto's Rick Vaive added another tally for the Campbell Conference, beating Lindbergh unassisted. 8-3. Then, with just 42 agonizing seconds remaining, 99 scored yet again with more help from Messier for a 9-3 final before a stunned crowd of 15,230.

The four-goal outburst was an NHL all star game record. Gretzky walked away with Most Valuable Player honors and, while he didn't really get the girl (and if he did, it wasn't reported) he did get a $14,000 sports car.

The host Islanders? They got a measure of revenge that spring, sweeping Edmonton to win their fourth (and to date last) cup on that very same home ice. They held the Oilers to just six goals over four games and kept Gretzky -- he of the 71 regular season goals and 125 assists -- scoreless.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

The All Star Game That Nearly Wasn't

THEY RIPPED THE HEART right out of the baseball season. You'd think more people would remember.

Memory is a funny thing. Collective memory even more so. Bigger events often overwhelm their smaller, yet significant, antecedents. And so it was that the Major League Baseball job action that destroyed the entirety of the 1994 season came to eclipse the previously unprecedented strike of 1981.

The Late Summer Classic

But, 35 years ago, coming off a thrilling 1980 season that saw the Philadelphia Phillies win their first World Series -- the image of reliever Tug McGraw exultant after fanning the Royal's Willie Wilson for the final out still vivid -- the dark clouds of labor discord gathered.

Free agency was a mere five seasons old. Owners tiring of losing top stars for no return whatsoever demanded some form of compensation. The players' union, sensing a backdoor means of impeding their hard won player movement, refused to go along.

On June 12, 1981, they walked out. Baseball's cathedrals went dark, empty and unused, while standings and stats sat frozen in time.

Billy Martin's Oakland A's led the American League West, the New York Yankees characteristically ruled the A.L. East. Their National League nemeses, the Los Angeles Dodgers, aided by the brilliant rookie left-hander Fernando Valenzuela, ruled the West, while the defending champion Phillies sat atop the East. And sat. And sat. And sat.

The All Star Game, set for July 14 in Cleveland was postponed indefinitely and still the parties remained at loggerheads. More than seven hundred games went unplayed before peace prevailed on July 31, with a limited form of compensation for loss of upper-echelon players.

Those four teams in first place when the walkout began were declared first-half winners, the won-loss records were reset to 0-0 for an unprecedented second-half. But where to begin?

Cleveland, site of the All Star game now rescheduled for Aug. 9, with the regular season to resume the next day.

Team rosters were stocked with players worthy of the contest.

The N.L.'s starting nine featured three future members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame: Philly's Mike Schmidt at third base, the Montreal Expos' outfielder Andre Dawson and catcher Gary Carter, plus baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose. Among the senior circuit reserves, hall inductees Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver and Bruce Sutter.

Some of those on the NL ballot...

... and their AL counterparts.

The A.L. lineup was just as good, boasting Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk, California Angels' first baseman Rod Carew, Royals third baseman George Brett and Yankees outfielders Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield, backed by Hall members Eddie Murray, Rollie Fingers and others.

A nip-and-tuck affair, the game saw the A.L. lose leads of 1-0 and 4-2 before succumbing 5-4 before more than 72,000 fans at the antiquated, cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

Carter blasted two homers, but Schmidt's two-run shot off Fingers proved to be the game winner. The Baltimore Orioles' Ken Singleton had the lone junior circuit clout. Fingers took the loss. The San Francisco Giants' Vida Blue got credit for the win and Sutter, then toiling for the St. Louis Cardinals got the save.

Baseball was back. Sort of. The split season's second half would bear hope, heartbreak, injustice and -- unlike the catastrophic events of 1994 -- at least a championship.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive