All-Star game bringing home run intrigue to New York

Baseball’s All-Star game is a little bit of a sham — more of a mid-season jolly for the players and league executives than a serious measure of how the game’s best proponents measure up against each other.

Eighty years ago in the summer of 1933, the first exhibition game between the leagues — National and American — brought together the sport’s most prominent Irish-American managers and all-round forces of nature: Connie Mack and John McGraw.

Mack’s American League selection had Lou Gehrig at first base and Babe Ruth in right field and they won 4-2. It meant a lot more back then — almost 50,000 attended what was supposed to be an experimental one-off at the home of the Chicago White Sox, Comiskey Park, and two of the main radio broadcasters, NBC and CBS, sent commentary across the nation.