By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

One of the downsides of all of this sports nothingness is that you lose track of the calendar. As the days and weeks drone on, you forget what should be going on and what has gone on. For example, the Olympics were supposed to start next week; instead, baseball is going to start. Who had that in the office pool a year ago?

This would have been All-Star Week for baseball — strangely enough, only the second ever to be played at Dodger Stadium — and Tuesday came and went and hardly anyone noticed. I’m not sure Major League Baseball even noticed. Whoever was in charge of officially calling off the game didn’t get around to it until July 3. (Which makes you wonder if he holding out hope on July 2 that it might actually happen.)

The All-Star Game has always been special to me but I hate to admit that it is less so than it used to be. I suppose that’s the way it is for a lot of things, but it really hits home with what the game has become. Or, in the case of this year, what it hasn’t become.

I can rattle off so many memories of the game from years gone by: Fred Lynn’s grand slam at Comiskey Park (1983) … Dave Parker throwing out everybody in sight from right field in the Kingdome (1979) … Fernando Valenzuela striking out Dave Winfield, Reggie Jackson and George Brett in a row and then giving way to 19-year-old Dwight Gooden in the next inning … 15 innings at Anaheim in 1967 and then 1-0 the next year in the Astrodome … Bo Jackson’s leadoff home run in 1989 that still hasn’t landed. OK, I’ll stop.

Actually, I won’t.

There are two even memorable All-Star Games for me and they happened in back-to-back years. But the bigger issue for me was that July almost always brought me pain and woe. As an American League fan, it was crushing to watch my people get dusted every year. The National League won a heart-breaking 19 of 20 games from 1963 to 1982. That’s a lot of summer nights of going to sleep hacked off.

But the one year in that streak that the American League won was 1971. The game itself wasn’t that great (6-4 win by the AL) as it was for the people playing in it. The NBA likes to claim that the ’92 Dream Team was the greatest assembly of talent in the history of sport, but you could make the case that the two greatest teams were on the same field at Tiger Stadium in Detroit that night. Your call:

American League: Five Hall of Fame starters (Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Rod Carew and Luis Aparicio) plus four more on the bench (Al Kaline, Harmon Killebrew, Jim Palmer and Reggie Jackson, who hit the most mammoth home run ever). Oh, and the pitcher? Mansfield’s own Vida Blue, who was on his way to a 24-8 record and a 1.82 ERA and the league MVP as a rookie that year.

National League: Could I interest you in this batting order? Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, Willie Stargell, Willie McCovey and Johnny Bench. All are in the Hall of Fame. So are reserves Roberto Clemente, Lou Brock, Ron Santo, Steve Carlton, Juan Marichal, Tom Seaver and Ferguson Jenkins. Pete Rose should be.

But this is also the 50th anniversary of the 1970 All-Star game, which is known for Rose running over Ray Fosse at home plate to win the game in the 12th inning. (By the way, waving Rose around third base was Leo Durocher.) Baseball likes to claim that when they played the All-Star Game for World Series home field advantage a few years ago that it made the game “mean something,” but they obviously failed the history lesson.

Rose running over the catcher at home plate in an All-Star is what happens when a game “means something.” It was the 12th inning and nobody was worried about running out of pitching or putting a runner on second base so everybody could go home.

The man in the on deck circle when that play happened was Dick Dietz of the San Francisco Giants. Dietz, who died in 2005, would later go ion to be a coach in the Giants organization and in 1992, he was with the Shreveport Captains. One night after I had covered a game at Fair Grounds Field, I asked him about that play and he remembered it as making “a sickening sound.” As you can see by the above picture, Dietz (#2) had a pretty good view of the play.

These days that play is illegal, which is probably a good thing.

Which is more than you can say for what the All-Star Game has evolved into.

Picture Source: Cincinnati Magazine