he last time they played the All-Star Game at Fenway was one of those years they played two games. Twenty days earlier, they'd played in San Francisco and it all became so laughable -- what with Stu Miller being blown off the mound in the process of saving a 5-4, 10-inning win. Tickets for the Monday, July 31, game were easy to come by. Just walk up to the window during a four-game series with the Senators in June and buy one for $8.
The Red Sox' lone representative the last time the All-Star Game was at Fenway, rookie of the year pitcher Don Schwall, found himself amid a pair of Yankee sluggers: Mickey Mantle, left, and Roger Maris. (Red Sox photo)
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The round-trip fare on the Boston and Maine from Ayer was $1.50, the subway $1, round-trip. The only guys hanging out at the ticket office doorstep were autograph seekers, not scalpers. The program was 50 cents, 5 percent of what this game's program cost. Hot dogs were 50 cents, so were the sodas.
The game wasn't sold out; it drew 31,851. There was no workout day. Red Sox vice president Dick Bresciani still has the list of game-day events, which essentially came down to the marching band going onto the field at 12:40 p.m., doing the anthem, leaving the field at 12:50, first pitch 1:05.
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RELATED COVERAGE
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In Fenway games,
he was a mortal Man
There have been two previous All-Star Games at Fenway Park, and St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Stan Musial was the only player to play in both.
Ted Williams almost did it. Teddy Ballgame was the two-homer hero in the American League's 12-0 win at Fenway in 1946, but retired in 1960 and appeared at the '61 game only to throw out the first ball for what would be a 1-1 tie.
In 24 All-Star Games, Musial hit .317 with six homers, but he went 0 for 3 at Fenway. Musial started in left field in '46 and went 0 for 2 against Bob Feller. In the dreadful '61 game, Stan the Man struck out against Sox rookie Don Schwall while pinch hitting for Art Mahaffey in the fifth inning.
Interestingly, two Sox players have fond All-Star memories of Musial. Medford's Bill Monbouquette was only 23 years old when he was routed by the National League in his 1960 start, but Monbouquette's fondest memory is Musial asking him to dinner after the game. And Carl Yastrzemski, who was selected to 18 All-Star teams, best remembers his first - at Cleveland in 1963 - because it was Musial's final All-Star appearance as a player.
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For a teenager sitting in Section 1, it was nice. Not an event, nice. Where Mike Fornieles was the Boston representative in Candlestick, rookie of the year Don Schwall represented them at home, and was assured he would pitch.
The National League had eight Hall of Famers. The American League started a future US Senator, Jim Bunning, one of five Hall of Famers in the lineup. It also started John ''Honey'' Romano as the catcher, which made one wonder if Cleveland was stuffing the ballot box back then, as well.
In that 50-cent scorebook, Don Zimmer and Eddie Kasko had their pictures next to each another.
Admittedly, this was the first post-Ted year in Red Sox history, and there was some renewal of hope with rookies Schwall, Carl Yastrzemski, and Chuck Schilling. But there was a sense that the Olde Towne Team was slipping into the Dark Ages, a notion confirmed soon thereafter.
The Red Sox had become tired, and when one looked out and saw Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks and Roberto Clemente, and realized that because those Red Sox were the Red Sox (only two years earlier they were the last team to break the color line with Pumpsie Green) it was clear that, a couple of years pre-Dylan, they weren't goin' nowhere.
So while Mays and Eddie Mathews, Aaron and Al Kaline received respectful applause in the introductions, Roger Maris got very little; he was on his way to 61, and he had only a pinch-hit appearance, for Romano. The biggest noise came when AL coach Pinky Higgins, the Red Sox manager, and Orval Faubus of Boston baseball, were announced, and boos rained down across the Charles.
The game itself was, well, just another game, which in those days meant any normal Red Sox game. Rocky Colavito hit one into the screen off NL starter Bob Purkey. After Bunning fired three shutout innings, the NL scored a run off local hero Schwall in his third inning, the sixth. Luis Aparicio made an unusually poor play and failed to charge Kasko's two-out topped roller, loading the bases. Bill White then hit a sharp ground ball up the middle that tied the game, but Aparicio made a great play, holding Orlando Cepeda at third.
The AL used three pitchers for three innings apiece; the NL used three pitchers for two innings each, then Miller for three, in which time he fanned five batters. At the end of nine innings, the time of game was 147 minutes.
At the end of the ninth, it began to rain and rain hard, and that was that. Within minutes, the game was called. Tie, 1-1. Most fans had no idea that Major League Baseball knew the rain was coming, and appreciating that no one wanted to play this game long into the night, there was an agreement that they'd try to get in nine innings, then hit the fast lane if it started to rain.
So when they announced that it was over, fans walked in the rain to their cars or the subway, and were off to North Station and the 5:30 to Ayer. That's all it was. We got to see Willie and Henry and Banks and those great players we never saw otherwise, and no one seemed to care who won, who lost, who tied. No one worried that Tony Kubek, Jackie Brandt, Terry Francona, Whitey Ford, or Zimmer didn't play.
It was a cheap day. Ticket, round-trip train and subway, program, a dog, and two Cokes: $12. Maybe Higgins heard us out there in Section 1. Mays, Mantle, and Kaline played the entire game, and that's about all we could have asked for the last time they played the All-Star Game in Fenway Park.
--Dan Shaughnessy
