The Midsummer Classic

The All-Star Game is always bittersweet for me, as it seems to be the point in which the rest of summer becomes a blur and the next thing you know the garden's dormant, leaves are falling......

I've already had three students email me to get the syllabus for a class this fall: weenies!

Anyhoo, one of my first baseball memories was when I was five, when Reggie Jackson hit the homer on the roof at old Tigers Stadium. Somehow that made a real impression on me. Irish Elk has a roundup of the like that can only be found at the Irish Elk, which includes his (decidely premature) rooting for a White Sox/Nationals World Series.

Other vivid All-Star game memories: when we were kids, we used to play Stratomatic constantly through the summer. We played lots of board games: Monopoly games that would last 2 weeks, Risk games that would inevitably end in backyard brawling, but Stratomatic was the King. I remember we tried playing a 160 game schedule with four teams that we created (I think we just shuffled, we didn't have a "draft"), but I can't remember whether the whole season got played. But the All-Star game was always fun because we'd listen on the radio on the back screened porch, but lie on the floor and play our own game. My older brother Lou would keep score of both games, and we'd pore over the score sheets for weeks.

Anyhoo, I haven't watched or listened to the All-Star game in eons, but I always note its passage, and with it the passing of Summer in a hazy blur.