The Major League Baseball All-Star Games of the Eighties
1980- Over 56,000 fans filled Dodger Stadium on July 8th to watch the Orioles’ Steve Stone and the Astros’ J. R. Richard start the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Stone threw three perfect innings while Richard gave up just one hit in a pair of frames’ work. Richard struck out Stone to end the second; nobody could have possibly known he would never throw another pitch in the majors. A stroke a few days later would end his career and threaten his life. Fred Lynn’s two run homer in the fifth gave the American League the upper hand, but in true AL Major League Baseball All-Star Game form, they squandered the lead. Game MVP Ken Griffey got the NL’s first hit, a home run, in the bottom of the fifth, and the Nationals scored twice in the next inning to take a 3-2 lead. Yankee second baseman and current Mets’ skipper Willie Randolph’s error on a Dave Winfield grounder allowed the go-ahead run to score, and Bruce Sutter came on to make that run, and an insurance tally, stand up for a 4-2 NL triumph. Like Bobby Bonds a few years before, Griffey was a Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVP, one who would also raise a Hall of Fame bound son.
1981- A player’s strike caused the Major League Baseball All-Star Game to be played in August, on the 9th in Cleveland in front of 72,000, the largest crowd to ever witness the event. The game was played as a prelude to the second half of the season as the players came back from striking; a total of fifteen pitchers were used as most were not ready to go extended innings. The Nationals got two solo homers from Montreal’s Gary Carter and one from Dave Parker, but still needed Mike Schmidt’s two run blast in the eighth to take a 5-4 lead. Enter Bruce Sutter once more for a 1-2-3 ninth, striking out the opposing pitcher, Dave Stieb, who was forced to bat since AL manager Jim Frey had nobody left on his bench to pinch-hit. Carter’s homers made him the Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVP, and Schmidt, who hit the game winner, talked about the just completed strike’s effect on fans. “Whatever damage the game’s suffered has been done and can’t be undone. Now we have to start the rehabilitation.”
1982- Long before Dennis Eckersley gave up the famous home run to Kirk Gibson in the 1988 World Series, he surrendered a less famous one in a Major League Baseball All-Star Game. On July 13th the game was played in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, making it the first Major League Baseball All-Star Game to be played outside of the United States. Eckersley, at the time a Boston hurler, allowed Dave Concepcion to take him deep in the second; it was just the Reds’ shortstop’s second long ball in 329 at bats that season. It turned him into the Major League Baseball All-Star Game’s MVP when the AL could scratch for only one run against seven NL pitchers. One of the seven was the recently deceased Steve Howe of the Dodgers, playing in his only Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
1983- Wonder of wonders! The American League wins a Major League Baseball All-Star Game! On July 6th, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, they scored seven times in the third off of the Giants’ Atlee Hammaker, highlighted by Fred Lynn’s grand slam. The blow gave them a 9-1 lead, one that even they could not screw up, and helped to break their eleven game Major League Baseball All-Star Game losing skein to the NL. Lynn, then with the Angels, was the MVP because of his four run homer; his former teammate Jim Rice also jacked one out. Rod Carew, well on his way to the Hall of Fame, went 2 for 3; pitcher Alan Bannister praised Carew with this bit of flattery. “He’s the only guy I know that can go 4 for 3.”
1984- In his last season with the Expos, Gary Carter would once more come away with the Major League Baseball All-Star Game honors. His homer in the second gave the NL the lead for good as it went on to a 3-1 defeat of the AL on July 10th in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Candlestick, where Stu Miller was blown off of the mound in the 1961 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, was not Carter’s favorite place to play. He hoped before the contest that the “American League would experience some of the same frustrations we all experience here during the regular season.” The AL’s frustration had a lot to do with the NL pitching, which yielded but four hits in the final seven innings. Making the first of his fifteen Major League Baseball All-Star Game appearances was the Padres’ Tony Gwynn, such a good hitter that former major leaguer Al Leiter used to offer this advice on how to get him out. “Throw it down the middle and hope he hits it at some one.” As for Candlestick, a place that outfielder Bobby Murcer had suggested that fugitive Patty Hearst should hide out in because of its cavernous upper decks, it still stands. It withstood the great California earthquake during the 1989 World Series, with 62,000 people inside, almost as if the safety of those souls was the only reason the park was built in the first place.
1985- Another park that wasn’t among the players “Field of Dreams, the Metrodome in Minneapolis, was the site of the Major League Baseball All-Star game on July 16th. When the NL scored a couple of early runs, the game was in the bag. They cruised to a 6-1 cakewalk, as MVP LaMarr Hoyt, Nolan Ryan, Fernando Valenzuela, Jeff Reardon, and Goose Gossage shut down the AL attack. Throwing two shutout innings of his own was the AL’s Donnie Moore, making his only Major League Baseball All-Star Game showing. Moore would give up a home run to Boston’s Dave Henderson the following fall in the playoffs, ultimately costing his Angels the AL pennant. He never mentally recovered and would shockingly shoot his estranged wife, and then himself, in 1989. She survived, but he did not.
1986- Although the National League had made a habit of winning the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, things were about to change. Starting in 1986, they would win only four of the next twenty played. The turnabout began on July 15th in the Astrodome, with Detroit’s “Sweet” Lou Whitaker hammering a two run homer early on. Kansas City’s Frank White chipped in with a solo shot to stake the AL to a 3-0 Major League Baseball All-Star Game lead. The NL scored a pair in the eighth to make it 3-2 but Chris Brown of the Giants hit into a double play in the ninth to end things and give the American nine a hard fought 3-2 win. “Rocket” Roger Clemens was named the MVP for his three perfect innings of work; he threw only 24 pitches, 21 for strikes. While not on a par with Carl Hubbell’s great Major League Baseball All-Star Game heroics of 1934, the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela struck out five batters in a row- Don Mattingly, Cal Ripken Jr, Jesse Barfield, Lou Whitaker, and the pitcher, Teddy Higuera.
1987- Scoring was scarce at Oakland’s Alameda County Coliseum on July 14th at the Major League Baseball All-Star Game. How scarce you ask? No other Major League Baseball All-Star Game had gone scoreless beyond five innings-this one went to the thirteenth tied at 0-0! Finally, in the top of unlucky thirteen (for the AL at least), Tim Raines of the Expos tripled home a pair of runs. MVP Raines had three of the National League’s eight hits. The American squad only had six for the entire extra inning affair, and Boston’s Dwight Evans had two of thoser. All-time saves leader Lee Smith and the Mets’ Sid Fernandez finished off the American League with four innings of two-hit ball. When Yogi Berra once saw a pair of streakers running naked during a game, someone asked him later what sex they were. He answered, “I don’t know. They had bags over their heads.” But even Yogi could have seen that good pitching always stops good hitting, especially in the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
1988-Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati would host the Major League Baseball All-Star Game on July 12th, and Oakland A’s catcher Terry Steinbach would make history. When the Mets’ Darryl Strawberry could not corral Terry’s deep fly to right leading off the third against Dwight Gooden, the resulting home run made Steinbach the answer to this trivia question- Who is the only player to hit a home run in both his first major league at bat and his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game at bat? The backstop’s sac fly in the fourth would untie the game and be the winning RBI of the 2-1 AL win. Both sides used eight hurlers, as it seemed the day of three or four pitchers doing all the work in the Major League Baseball All-Star Game were now over.
1989- The AL unleashed a thunderbolt from above in the form of Bo Jackson, a standout in both the NFL and baseball. In the sixtieth edition of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, on July 11th in Anaheim, Jackson hit a 448 foot home run, stole a base, and made a running catch to save two runs. 3,000 hit man wade Boggs also added a homer, but it was Bo’s show. Former Negro League player Buck O’Neill said in a recent Sporting news interview that he has only heard the ball making contact with the bat make a certain unmistakable sound when three men hit it; Babe Ruth, Josh Gibson, and Bo Jackson. Alas, baseball would never get to see what Jackson was truly capable of, as a horrible hip injury incurred while with the NFL’s Raiders in 1990 would force his retirement at the age of 31 in 1994. Nolan Ryan would make his final Major League baseball All-Star game appearance, striking out three in two innings, and the AL held on for a 5-3 win. The Major League Baseball All-Star Game standings now read 37-22-1 in favor of the senior circuit, but would become tighter before the new millennium came to pass.
