I will be starting a series of sorts as I post all of the All-Star Game scoresheets I have, starting with the first I scored in 1998. I will not be revisiting 1999 (#103) or 2008 (#29), I missed 2003, and we all missed 2020. Otherwise I think I have an intact set. There are a couple good things about All-Star scoresheets. One is that keeping them proves that you are scorekeeping fanatic (although I suppose that having a vanity blog that posts scoresheets kept over almost thirty years already should suffice on that front). A second is that they are great snapshots of an era and a moment in time in the game, something that becomes more apparent with times than instead of being the names you think about every day as a baseball fan, names like Clemens and Maddux and Griffey and Piazza and Sheffield and McGwire leap off the page, and names like Erstad and Durham and O’Neill and Grieve and Kendall and Urbina now strike as more interesting in many ways than they were in the past, as some of them have become college coaches and others are reduced to an aging Mike Hargrove remembering only as the “little black guy from the White Sox” in a radio interview (Durham) and others have been jailed in tinpot dictatorships.
A few notables from this game, which in true ‘90s fashion was slugfest taken 13-8 by the junior circuit at that most ‘90s of ballparks, Coors Field:
* Roberto Alomar was the MVP, collecting a bunt hit in his first at bat, a homer later, another single, reaching on an error, and stealing two bases.
* Barry Bonds walked, flied out, then blasted a three-run homer off Bartolo Colon.
* Alex Rodriguez was voted in as the starter over Derek Jeter in this more enlightened time, homering in the fifth before Jeter replaced him.
* The AL stole six bases, the NL none. The AL
* Sammy Sosa did not appear in the game; I had to look up that he missed the game with a sore shoulder, at first wondering whether he had been left off the All-Star team as he chased Mark McGwire and Roger Maris.
* Jeff Shaw made his first appearance in a Dodger uniform in this game, as he had just been acquired from Cincinnati.
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