For a few minutes at Citizens Bank Park on Tuesday night, the All-Star Game stopped feeling like a showcase for the sport’s biggest names and started feeling like what baseball really is.
MLB had 78 players in this year’s Midsummer Classic, and those 78 came into the night with 206 All-Star Game selections between them. The room was full of MVPs, Silver Sluggers, Cy Young Awards, World Series rings, and all the other hardware that comes with being elite. But the most memorable stretch of the night had nothing to do with that.
Between innings, Major League Baseball rolled out a recreation of a scene from “The Sandlot,” one of the great baseball movies. Kids rode bikes to the field, fireworks lit up the sky, and Ray Charles’ “America The Beautiful” played over slow-motion baseball imagery. Then MLB took it a step further: when the gates opened in the right field corner, 10 kids came out on bikes, crossed the field, and got the chance to meet the players they look up to.
That was the whole point. Baseball as a kid’s game.
Baseball as wonder. Baseball as something that still has room for trading cards, playing catch, and meeting your idols.
Brandon Marsh said it was one of his favorite parts of the night.
“That was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game,” Marsh told us during Tuesday night’s game. “(The Sandlot) was my favorite baseball movie growing up.
When I hear that song, it almost brings tears to my eyes. It takes me back to being five years old watching that movie.”
Marsh’s moment came with a Phillies fan who had his own family connection to the game. Marsh said he talked with the kid for a few minutes, learned that the child’s grandma is a huge fan, and then took the kid’s phone to record a video for her.
Jacob Misiorowski got a different kind of request. The child who biked over to him asked to see his pitching grips, and Misiorowski obliged.
I asked Misiorowski if he voluntarily showed the child his pitching grips. He did not.
That was the child’s first question. “He asked me to see them, so I showed him,” Misiorowski said.
“That was a really, really cool moment.” Maybe he’ll take those grips back to the little league mound.
After the game, National League manager Dave Roberts talked about what that kind of moment means. Roberts has spent a long time around baseball, and he pointed out how hard it is to get to the majors in the first place.
“We were all one of those kids,” Roberts told me postgame. “Some of these kids might never get to step on a Major League field. For them to have that opportunity to have a conversation with an All-Star is something they might never have the chance to do again.”
The lights, the fireworks, the song, the bikes, the kids, the players - all of it landed exactly right. MLB nailed it.
And for those five minutes, baseball looked exactly like the beautiful game it’s always been.
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