Baseball has become America’s game once again.
The Major League All-Star Game is tonight and will have to go some to equal the Home Run Derby Monday night. It was not only a spectacle of home run missiles in high altitude of Colorado, it represented the country as it is today more than ever.
Dubbed the National Pastime when baseball was a segregated game played by white men without apology, it was apropos that the sport keeps trying to right that wrong from having a Jackie Robinson Day each season when every player wears his No. 42 for one game.
The Home Run Derby included a tribute to the late Hank Aaron, another black superstar pioneer who was perhaps the greatest righthand hitter of all time and the undisputed home run champion before the age of steroids. Every participant wore his No. 44.
Appropriately, the All-Star Game has its political undercurrent, since the mid-season extravaganza was moved from Atlanta because of controversial voting laws passed by the state of Georgia. The star players represented all races and countries, which is nice to see.
MLB has turned the Home Run Derby from an old black and white TV competition in an empty stadium, which Aaron won six straight years, to a made-for-TV spectacular at a sold-out Coors Field of 50,000 fans, who made up a massive melting pot.
The drama was in the stories of its eight competitors, including the new Babe Ruth, Japanese pitcher and slugger Shohei Ohtani, who hit 33 home runs during the first half of the regular season and will be the on the mound for the American League to start the game.
Ohtani was eliminated in double overtime by Juan Soto, a Dominican immigrant who signed for $1.5 million at age 16 and has become one of the young superstars. In the end, cancer-survivor Trey Mancini lost to defending champ Pete Alonso, nicknamed Polar Bear, perhaps baseball’s best power hitter who doesn’t play the rest of the game well enough to make the All-Star team.
The sport is now multi-cultural in every way that supports its minority players by moving from political hotbed to cool open spaces where the National Anthem was piped in from iconic Red Rocks Park.
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