Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Bluefield, WV

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July 8, 2009

The heat is on for the All-Star game but not anything like ’66 in St. Louis

By LARRY HYPES

Ah, the All-Star Game is coming back to St. Louis! Remember the 1966 game when Busch Memorial Stadium was only a couple of months old?

That was the day the field temperature on that crazy turf was measured at about 110 degrees. The NBC cameras had to be packed in dry ice to keep them working. If I recall right, the temperature had been at least 90 degrees in St. Louis for all but one day of the previous three weeks.

On the day of the All-Star game, broadcaster Curt Gowdy made mention of the fact that the heat had hit 100 in the city for the fifth straight time.

Because we used to listen to the Cardinals games all the time, I knew about that heat. In the days of old Sportsman’s Park, the club would often hire somebody with a tractor to come into the park and plow up the infield when St. Louis was not playing at home just to try to keep the ground a little bit soft.

They would do some crazy things, like trying to fry eggs on the dugout roof. A generation before, Cardinal great Dizzy Dean and some of his buddies made fun of the heat by building a fire and doing a rain a dance in front of the dugout. Now you know another reason they called him “Dizzy.”

Ted Williams was an honorary coach for the American League and smart enough not to spend much time out the sun. Casey Stengel was another honorary coach, for the National League, and Ol’ Case showed up in his former New York Mets uniform.

Williams was an all-time All-Star with some big game winning home runs in the Mid-Summer classic including the one he blasted with two outs in the ninth inning in 1941 to drive in three runs and give the American League a 9-7 win. Williams hit two home runs and two doubles and drove in 5 runs in the ’46 game at Fenway Park in Boston.

A lot of our local Boys of Summer were not even born when Brooks Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles slipped a hot shot past Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves (they had moved from Milwaukee only a year before) for a triple off Sandy Koufax. B. Robby scored on a wild pitch and the A.L. took a 1-0 lead after just two innings.

That 1966 game had about 14 (future) Hall of Famers in it but I was disappointed because my hero, Bob Gibson, was hurt and could not play even after being named to the team.

Gibson told somebody it “about 185 degrees” so he did not come to the ball park that day but instead stayed in the team hotel’s swimming pool a few blocks away.

Another tidbit about that blistering afternoon was this: it marked the only time that Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, and Willie Mays batted 1-2-3. Let’s see: the game’s best right fielder, the all-time home run leader, and maybe the best player ever. Not a bad outfield, huh?

Mays singled and scored the tying run in the sixth inning on a single by the Cubs’ Ron Santo, sandwiched around another Clemente base hit. It was one of the few times a Chicago Cubs player ever got a big hand in St. Louis.

Mays, as you old-timers will remember, was one of just two players to appear in 24 All Star games. Stan “The Man” Musial of the Cardinals was the other.

At that time, the Braves’ Joe Torre was the starting catcher for the National League and he caught the first 8 innings. Torre said it was “too hot to holler” at the pitchers after the first couple of innings and he just tried to last as long as he could.

Enter a young St. Louis catcher named Tim McCarver. McCarver, who once hit 13 triples and was known as one of the fastest catchers in the game for a while, got a hit to lead off the 10th inning.

After a sacrifice, McCarver scored on a single by the Dodgers’ Maury Wills and the National League won, 2-1. McCarver slid home in a cloud of dust but nobody helped him up because they were all trying to get off the field while they could still walk.

And this year? Well, St. Louis has two things you baseball fans might want to see: first, the game, and next, Albert Pujols, who is probably the best player in either league since Mays retired.

—Larry Hypes is a columnist for theDaily Telegraph.

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