In the Wikipedia article about Yankee Stadium, it notes that the Stadium hosted the 1939 All-Star Game. The article says that Yankee manager Joe McCarthy, the AL team manager in the game because the Yanks had won the league pennant the previous year, chose Lou Gehrig to play first base for the AL team. Is this not incorrect, because Lou had come to the end of the line the previous April? Why would McCarthy put him in the All-Star Game?
Honorary captain for the AL team. He did not play.
He was a reserve player in that game. He was a team captain through 1939 but never took to the field after the April 30th game.
Thanks…so who did play?
Hank Greenberg, first baseman for the Detroit Tigers.
Luckily the game wasn’t played on Yom Kippur.
Now THAT would have been a neat trick!
The American League had 10 players (excluding pitchers) in reserve and only Myril Hoag got in the game. As a pinch hitter. The National League used a few more players (they lost 3-1) but it wasn’t like today when virtually everyone gets to play
So Joe McCarthy was the Anti-Torre wasn’t he?
[ul]Here is the box score.[/ul]
[ul]In 1939 Yom Kippur was on September 23.[/ul]
[ul]In 1939 the MLB season ended on Sunday, October 1.[/ul]
[ul]Mel Allen says on the radio broadcast, at 9:38 onward, that Connie Mack had been scheduled to be the AL manager in honor of the 100th anniversary of baseball, but that Mack was ill (and listening at home to the game) so McCarthy replaced Mack.[/ul]
[ul]Also on the radio broadcast, Arch McDonald announces the batting averages as hundreds – “two hundred eighty-eight…three hundred seven…three hundred twenty-six…”. Who, if anyone, does that these days?
[/ul]
I read that a few years later McCarthy was again the AL All-Star game manager; stung by taunts that he used the Yankees to win the games, he used not one Yankee eligible for the game–and the AL still won.
Sounds like the 1943 All Star game. Glancing through the box score on baseball-reference I see about seven Yankees on the roster and none appearing in the game