I received an email last week that reminded me of a historic moment in my youth.
In the email, Major League Baseball told Rockies fans how to access an app that would enable them to vote as many as seven times a day for their favorite players in All-Star Game balloting, in particular for Hunter Goodman in the Rockies’ case.
My immediate thought was of Cincinnati in 1957 and how things have changed.
That was the year—if you’re old enough to recall—when rabid baseball fans in The Queen City stuffed the ballot boxes and elected seven Reds starters to the 24th All-Star Game at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
The Redlegs, as they were called then to avoid any suggestion that the Reds were commie-associated, were riding the crest of success they hadn’t experienced in more than a decade.
A National League pennant was still possible when Cincinnati went to Chicago for the final weekend of the 1956 season (when the slugging Reds tied the major league team record for home runs held by the Yankees and sent five starters to the Game Between the Leagues).
A year later Cincinnati was in first place for 39 days between May 11 and that year’s All-Star Game.
Packing the 1957 NL starting lineup with Reds players was a real community effort.
Local television pioneer Ruth Lyons, who hosted the first midday TV talk show, The 50/50 Club, urged her legion of followers daily to vote for those Redlegs.
The radio voice of the Reds, Waite Hoyt, who won 237 games for the Yankees and six other teams in a 21-year Hall of Fame career, pushed voting for the home team’s players during every game broadcast.
Taverns and bars—of which there are many in the Greater Cincinnati area—made filling out a ballot a condition of service for patrons. Burger Beer, radio sponsor of all Reds broadcasts, provided thousands of ballots.
The Cincinnati Times-Star, one of Cincinnati’s two evening newspapers at that time, published a ballot daily that had fill-in blanks for all eight positions and listed the Reds’ starting lineup alongside—above the admonition, “Vote Early! Vote Often!”
And fans of all ages (including yours truly) filled out ballots from home and sent them in. One reportedly submitted 1,400 ballots herself, another 820. I wasn’t yet a teenager, but I originated my share, too.
Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, who had been National League President before becoming Major League Baseball’s third commissioner, was not pleased. “I can take it if we lose,” he said, “but I strongly object to our league making a burlesque out of the All-Star Game. I never want to see such an exhibition again.”
Frick responded by replacing two Cincinnati starters, Gus Bell and Wally Post, with Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, and, more emphatically, taking All-Star Game voting away from the fans.
Frick’s alternative was to have the players, managers and coaches choose the starters from among their opponents. Each would be allowed two votes for opposing players at each position.
Stan Musial, making his 14th All-Star appearance, was the only non-Cincinnati player voted into the NL starting lineup in 1957. He played the whole game at first base and had a double and a walk in four plate appearances.
The six Redlegs who made the team—catcher Ed Bailey, third baseman Don Hoak, shortstop Roy McMillan, second baseman Johnny Temple, left fielder Frank Robinson and demoted center fielder Gus Bell—went a combined 3-for-10, and Bell, who drew their only walk, drove in two runners with a pinch hit double. (Aaron and Mays went a combined 3-for-8.)
The AL won 6-5, the winning pitcher starter Jim Bunning, a native of Fort Thomas, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
Not until 1970—the infamous All-Star Game ironically played in Cincinnati and decided when the Reds’ Pete Rose, who grew up in Cincinnati, obliterated catcher Ray Fosse to score the game-winner in the 12th inning—did Bowie Kuhn restore suffrage to the fans. He oversaw distribution of 26 million ballots to once again legalize fan participation.
The top vote-getters in 1957, Cincinnati’s Frank Robinson and Ed Bailey, received just under three-quarters of a million votes each. That’s less than six percent combined of the total ballots circulated 13 years later.
One month before this summer’s All-Star Game, the top vote-getters—Shohei Ohtani in the NL and Yordan Alvarez in the AL—each had already received more than a million votes.
I’m left to wonder: What would Ford Frick say?
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Denny Dressman writes a weekly sports column for The Villager. You can write to Denny at dennydressman@comcast.net.