theathleticuk
PHILADELPHIA Hey, sometimes you get a dud.
Its baseball, its one game, it happens.
If everything unfolded like a fairy tale, Kyle Schwarber would have won the All-Star Game in a swing-off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, instead of in Atlanta last summer.
Major League Baseball tries hard to script its midsummer showcase, but the game doesnt always comply.
American League pitchers kept National League hitters from advancing past first base in a star-spangled, 4-0 snoozer for Americas 250th.
To paraphrase Michael Scott: Happy birthday, America.
Sorry your partys so lame.
Advertisement Thats Michael Scott from The Office, of course, not the Mike Scott who started for the NL in the 1987 All-Star Game, when the leagues traded zeroes for 12 innings in the Oakland shadows.
That game was dominated by pitchers, too, though the hitters fanned just 17 times in 13 innings.
In nine innings Tuesday, they struck out 27 times.
It was a clinic in modern pitching.
The guys are gross, man, said Adley Rutschman, the Baltimore Orioles catcher.
They attack guys, fill it up and put them away.
Indeed.
And heres what stands out about Tuesday: these werent even the famous guys.
Twenty different pitchers took the mound in this All-Star Game, and none has ever won a Cy Young Award.
Only one, Aroldis Chapman of the Boston Red Sox, can make a case for the Hall of Fame.
Again, some years are like that.
In 1983, when six 300-game winners were still active Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry and Tom Seaver only one Hall of Famer, Lee Smith, pitched in the game.
None of the other 11 pitchers ever made it to a second ballot.
Some, such as Bill Dawley, Dave Dravecky, Bob Stanley and Matt Young, never even appeared on one.
How about the last Philadelphia All-Star Game, in 1996? Do you know who threw the most pitches, besides AL starter Charles Nagy? It was a fellow named Roger Pavlik, a Texas Ranger who finished that season with a 5.19 ERA and was soon out of baseball.
The NL won that night, 6-0, and while the game featured three Hall of Fame pitchers, the best of them was just starting out.
Pedro Martinez, then with the Montreal Expos, was a 24-year-old first-time All-Star who had never appeared on a Cy Young ballot.
That night changed him.
In the bullpen at Veterans Stadium, Martinez studied the warm-up of Tom Glavine, the decorated Atlanta Braves lefty and master of the off-speed pitch.
He noticed Glavine dotting his changeups and curveballs, in and away, before going into the game.
Martinez had those pitches, too, but hed never concentrated on location like Glavine did.
Advertisement To me, that was so important, because I normally would rely on the difference in speeds between the fastball and the changeup, Martinez told me a few years ago for K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches, my book on the craft of pitching.
I was never worried about spotting the changeup or spotting the breaking ball.
A lot of people tell me, Oh Pedro, you were so gifted.
I say, No, I was just a patch of a lot of players.
I wasnt born with all this.
In the seven seasons after that All-Star Game, Martinez would go 118-36 with a 2.20 ERA, an astonishing run that he traced to that night at the Vet.
Who knows, then, what lessons might have taken root at Citizens Bank Park on Tuesday? Joe Ryan, the Minnesota Twins right-hander, said he bonded with the Toronto Blue Jays Dylan Cease, who blew away Schwarber, Juan Soto and CJ Abrams in the first inning.
Cease and I were talking about some mechanical things, like with his head turn and how he thinks about that and approaches that, Ryan said.
I was like, Oh, (the heck with) it, Im going to try it for one pitch in the game.
But its cool.
Youre always trying to learn something new and improve your game.
Thats why we do it; it makes it fun.
The pitch missed its mark Weve got to work on it in the bullpen, Ryan said but maybe, in time, a new trick can elevate Ryans game.
It did for Roy Halladay, when Mariano Rivera shared his cutter grip before the 2008 All-Star Game in the Bronx.
Halladay traced his fingers on a ball with a pen, so hed always remember it.
He carried that ball with him for the rest of his career, and now it resides at the Hall of Fame.
Bryan Baker, the Tampa Bay Rays closer, was a first-time All-Star at 31 years old.
After Chapman got the first two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Baker collected the last.
He was honored to share an inning with Chapman.
Advertisement I had the notepad out, Baker said.
Coming in, Ive been saying I really just wanted to watch him work and try to pick up on anything I could, just because of the longevity and how electric his stuff is.
Pretty cool to be in the same bullpen with him and all those other arms, too.
I was looking around and kind of starstruck myself.
He didnt really have a notepad, did he? Mental notes, for sure, Baker said.
You can pick up on routines and all kinds of stuff, even the way you get warmed up.
Its different in that setting because its not a normal game, really.
But theres still stuff to learn.
Could the stars have shone a little brighter on Tuesday night? Of course.
Big names such as Jacob Misiorowski, Shohei Ohtani, Chris Sale, Cam Schlittler, Paul Skenes, Justin Verlander, Logan Webb and Yoshinobu Yamamoto all earned All-Star nods, but did not or could not pitch.
For various reasons, well-established aces around the league Sandy Alcantara, Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Tarik Skubal, Zack Wheeler, pick your favorite Seattle Mariner didnt make it.
What we witnessed, though, reflected a truth about todays game: theres a deeper reservoir of power pitchers than ever before.
Chapman, an elder statesman at 38, said through an interpreter that he liked what he saw.
Everybody had high velocity, quality pitches, command and you can see it when you see the box score, only three hits, he said, before adding the understatement of the night.
They did a very good job.