2 All Star Games?

My friend Bob and I love to discuss baseball and the trivial aspects of it. So last week he asked me if there had ever been 2 All Star games in one year. My answer was "No." and "You're crazy." Everybody knows that there is only one All Star Game.

Well, Bob is a pretty smart guy and sent me enough info to convince me that there had, indeed, been a period of time when there were two All Star Games each year. I needed to know more. Here comes the history...

The relationship between the players and owners has always been stormy (I'm putting together a more comprehensive post on that for later). The short version is that the "Golden Rule" applied: "He who has the gold makes the rules." In MLB's case the gold belonged to the owners.

When the last competitor to the MLB collapsed in 1946 (The Mexican League) the players who had jumped over to it found themselves blacklisted by the MLB. At the same time a lawyer named Robert Murphy was secretly talking to MLB players, attempting to organize them into a union. TheAmerican Baseball Guild didn't really get anywhere, but it came close enough the the owners decided to allow the players to pick a group of player representatives. They also gave the players some concessions (minimum pay reductions, a minimum salary ($5000) and expense money for Spring Training and the promise to create a players' pension plan.

This brings us back to my original conversation with Bob about those doubled All Star Games. Although the owners had agreed to fund the pension plan that didn't mean they wanted to lose their own money to do it. So when the owners fell behind in their payments in 1959 a second game was organized to make up the difference. So, from 1959 to 1962 there were two All Star Games each summer. The first one was the "official" game. The second was for the players' pension.

There wasn't any apparent structure to when the 2nd game was to be played. One year they were only 2 days apart and other years they were almost a month apart. One year both games were played in National League cities. Other years they were split between the leagues. But eventually the fans started to vote with their tickets. The second game drew fewer and fewer fans. By 1961 there was talk of eliminating the 2nd game and after 1962 they did. The owners agreed to give more of the money from the original All Star Game to the players' fund and the 2nd game was dropped.

Here are some links to my sources...

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/all_star.jsp All of the scores of all of the All Star Games

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert.mlb This is a fascinating paper on the economic changes in baseball over the years!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/sports/baseball/15sandomir.html A NY Times article about the double All Star Games