1955—An All-Star Game to Remember

If it’s mid-July, it’s likely to be Bastille Day, that day when Americans celebrate their French heritage and culture. Yet for sporting enthusiasts the more resonant event will be Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.

This July 14, 2015, both events will coincide. The eighty-sixth mid-season contest between the premier players of the American League and the National League will be played at the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio. There likely won’t be a cadre of French waiters racing each other through the stands, their upturned palms balancing trays containing glasses of red and white wine teetering precariously.

Yet for certain there will be countless gallons of frothy beer dispensed in countless plastic cups, all sold at Champagne prices. Typically expectations are always high for this annual rite of summer. But could it be anything like the stellar classic that was played sixty years ago in Milwaukee’s County Stadium?

The date was July 12, 1955. By the strangest coincidence, the game took place on the same day as Arch Ward’s funeral. Ward, a sports editor for the Chicago Tribune, is credited with establishing the All-Star game in 1933.

If you were lucky enough to have been in the ballpark that sunny afternoon, you saw baseball at its finest—a fitting eulogy to the fan whose vision it was to pit the best against the best. And some of the all-time best took the field, including Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford of the Yankees; the veteran Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox; and the National League’s young slugging duo, Willie Mays of the New York Giants and Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves.

In all, there were seventeen future Hall-of-Famers in uniform that day, not the least of whom was the Cardinals star hitter, Stan Musial, whose twelfth-inning home run won the game for the National League, 6–5. With the game starting at 3:17 p.m., dinner was late for many of the 45,643 fans who sat riveted to the end.

—James Barber, historian