NEW YORK — Joe Morgan looks at what’s happened to the All-Star game, and he doesn’t like what he sees.
The Hall of Fame second baseman remembers when the top stars played all nine innings, when the All-Stars drew huge ratings.
Not anymore.
“Part of the reason the game doesn’t bring that energy is it’s a different game now. Now it’s considered an exhibition, where as before it was considered life and death,” he said Thursday during an ESPN conference call to preview its All-Star coverage.
The last time the All-Star game was at Yankee Stadium, in 1977, Morgan led off the game with a home run off Jim Palmer. A 10-time All-Star with the Cincinnati Reds and Houston Astros, Morgan’s National League teams were a perfect 10-0 against the American Leaguers.
“If you had Willie Mays and those guys with the attitude that they had playing now, you’d have that same awareness,” Morgan said. “I don’t say the players don’t play hard. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m saying that before, Willie Mays might play the whole game. Hank Aaron might play the whole game. Now it’s, you know, two innings, three innings and everything is changed. By the sixth inning or something, you do not have the same type of stars in the game that you had before.”
Mays went the distance in 11 All-Star games and Aaron nine, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. When Carlos Beltran went all nine innings at Pittsburgh two years ago, it marked the first time a player had started and finished an All-Star game since Ken Griffey Jr., Brady Anderson and Ray Lankford in 1997 at Cleveland.
Now, there’s more of an emphasis of getting in as many players as possible. In 1986, Jose Canseco complained when AL manager Dick Howser didn’t get him into the All-Star game at Houston’s Astrodome.
“You play under the parameters that you’re expected to play,” said Boston’s Terry Francona, this year’s AL manager. “So we try to do everything. In ” 05,we were very fortunate. It worked out very well. We got almost everybody in the game and we won the game.”
Morgan thinks the All-Star game used to have a special appeal that it now lacks. Having it decide which league gets home-field advantage in the World Series, an innovation that began in 2003, doesn’t help.
“Unless the players buy into it, it doesn’t matter what you say,” he said. “You can say, ‘This one counts,’ you can say anything you want, but the players are the ones that make the game, not the marketing.”
Former New York Mets general manager Steve Phillips, an ESPN analyst, thinks changes in baseball have played a part in the All-Star game’s declining intensity.
“To a certain degree, interleague play has kind of diluted that feeling of playing against the other league because, you know, they’re kind of used to doing it,” he said. “And I think the other thing is free agency. I mean, players now look at themselves as major league players, not American League guys and National League guys, because, you know, from one year to the next, they may be flipping from one league to the other league.”
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