One more All-Star word

I grew up in a world of National League hegemony spanning the last few years of the reserve clause and the first generation of free-agency: the days of the Dodger infield staying intact for a decade; of the Reds' line-up almost unchanged throughout the seventies; of Steve Carlton, Gary Maddox, Greg Luzinski, Larry Bowa, Mike Schmidt and and Bob Boone, the core of the Phillies, returning to the playoffs year after year. These were the All-Star years of Pete Rose ramming Ray Fosse and essentially ending Fosse's productive career, of Rose and some other Reds sneaking rabbit Japanese baseballs into batting practice and hitting moonshots while the AL watched, agape.

Things were so bad that, by 1983, the NL had won something like 17 of 18. The game, in the minds of many, had lost its purpose. There was talk of re-shuffling the line-ups, East v. West perhaps. As Tom Boswell recounted some years ago, NL manager Whitey Herzog allegedly did something for the good of the game. To put it bluntly, he tanked. Given the opportunity to stock his team with five Hall-of-Famers (Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Phil Niekro, Steve Carlton, Bruce Sutter), Herzog ignored them all in favor of the likes of Atlee Hammaker, Pascual Perez, and Lee Smith, all of them kids, all of whom were shelled as the AL won. Smith would, of course, grow to be quite a reliever; Perez might have done so without the drugs; but Hammaker, as they say, was never quite the same.