The Major League Baseball All-Star Game brings back fond memories of when Dan Uggla single-handedly lost it for the NL in 2008 and when Vincente Padilla could’ve gone all night in 2002, at least until Bud Selig saved Padilla’s arm and ruined everyone’s fun. No matter how much it “counts,” the All-Star Game is still just a silly exhibition, and one watered down by nearly two decades of interleague play and—and this is an estimate—several interminable millennia of Joe Buck’s presence.
A decent bit of counterprogramming has emerged from the depths of YouTube, in the form of The First Annual All-Star Celebrity Softball Game. It’s from 1967, so all your favorites are there, from Mets and Dodgers hit-by-pitch maestro Ron Hunt, to Bill Dana, whose Jose Jimenez character drew the ire of Anthony Muñoz in The Right Stuff. Dana seems to have been the mastermind of the whole operation, and the one in charge of wrangling Don Adams, Dick Shawn, Steve Allen, and other luminaries from Hollywood’s mid-to-late 60’s A-minus list into a softball game against a number of future Hall of Famers. Vin Scully is behind the mic, which is the only part of it that feels normal.
Videos by VICE
Read More: Sudden Death, When Jean-Claude Van Damme Kicked The Pittsburgh Penguins Mascot
I have neither a clue nor a desire to guess whether there was a second All-Star Celebrity Softball Game, at least in this iteration. No real charity is mentioned as a beneficiary, and the format had a ways to go to evolve to Rock-N’-Jock levels, much less the format we see at the All-Star Game, where somewhat balanced teams of B-listers and Hall of Famers combine to entertain us/help us recover after Chris Berman has BACKBACKBACKBACK-ed us into submission earlier in the evening during the Home Run Derby.
There’s little available information about the All-Star Celebrity Softball Game, but it seems to have taken place before the 1967 season and dubbed afterwards. Pete Rose plays second base and wears the previous year’s uniform, while fellow participant Jim Piersall retired as an Angel a few months into the season. However, Scully mentions the Cardinals’ World Series win, as well as Maury Wills’ .300-ish average on the year. This, like the reason why there was never a Second Annual All-Star Celebrity Softball Game, remains a mystery.
Please resist the urge to make any jokes regarding Milton Berle and baseball bats. Please.
This game is full of both athletes who acted, and actors who athlete-ed. The celebrity team was a weird melange of go-go sixties sitcom stars, rough and tumble western actors, some of the greatest auteurs in the history of cinema, and tortured figures who would go on to be better appreciated in France. The pros team, as managed by baseball genius Milton Berle, is a mix of Hall Of Famers, people who probably should be in Cooperstown, athletes who are known for other things, and, inevitably, Tim McCarver.
Scully, who was still in the first third of his tenure calling Dodgers games and also moonlighting as narrator of the NBC sitcom “Occasional Wife,” is joined by Jerry Lewis, the self-appointed “Jewish Joe Garagiola.” All the quirks we associate with Vin Scully today were also there 48 years ago, only with fewer mentions of children almost being eaten by wolves, or the conservation status of the redhead. Lewis is perfectly fine and comparatively subdued as Vin’s color man, although he harps on certain things—the slight build of Woody Allen, for one, and also the empty seats in the Dodger Stadium outfield, which Scully explains as part of a bleacher repainting. The show’s credited writers, Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris, would go on to create “Diff’rent Strokes,” as well as write the timeless Joe Piscopo vehicle Johnny Dangerously, so Jerry sure knew how to pick collaborators even on his throwaway gigs.
This was quite possibly the #brand zenith for the game’s sole sponsor, the Aurora Plastics Corporation. Aurora was known for “hobbies,” or what could less generously be called toys kids stopped playing once video games were invented, such as slot cars and something called “Skittle Bowl,” which ads describe as “the next best thing to having a bowling alley in your living room.” Aurora went out of business in 1977.
The half-cocked rules of the game allowed for free substitution, which meant if James Garner pitched his way into trouble, his team could send in fast-pitch softball troubadour Eddie Feigner to work out of the jam. Woody Allen was nobody’s idea of a leading man, and is to this day nobody’s idea of a leadoff hitter; Robert Loggia was once young, and this game provides proof. It’s nice to imagine John Cassavetes, whose name is pronounced by Scully so that it rhymes with “diabetes,” rushing from the set of Faces to Dodgers Stadium. Bobby Darin, who I can’t think about without hearing “lingering heart issues which killed him at the age of 37,” proves a pretty good athlete in spite of his poor health, and gets a hit off of Don Drysdale in the second inning.
Robert Loggia was only 67 years old when this game was played.
The whole game has the strange, stilted feeling of a worked shoot. While I am not accusing the finest actors and baseball players of the 1960’s of rigging a celebrity softball game—that’s just not James Garner’s way—the tone of the game feels artificial, most notably in how suddenly the celebs come back and (almost) win. I can buy Peter Falk being a worse fielder than Frank Howard, but I can’t envision Roberto Clemente willingly piping the pitch that turned into a home run for Michael Callan, star of the aforementioned “Inside Schwartz” prototype “Occasional Wife.”
Of course, none of this matters, and all of it is good-natured in the extreme. There is even a lovable tone to the violence, like when Willie McCovey carries Bill Dana off the field during a fight, or when Don Adams bear-hugs Jimmy Piersall after the latter gets a double. The second half of Piersall’s career was fortunately a lot happier for him than the era depicted in Fear Strikes Out, and by this point in his career he was known more for on-field antics like running backwards after a homer than for suffering a nervous breakdown during a game. To see Piersall interact, nay, have fun with pioneering umpire Emmett Ashford is a joy, especially when Piersall lets Ashford bat after him.
Quite a few of the baseball stars had dalliances with Hollywood beyond this softball game. Jim Lefebvre had already played one of The Riddler’s henchmen on “Batman” by the time this aired, and would go on to play a bum on “Knight Rider” and other bit parts before managing three MLB clubs and the Chinese national baseball team. And just because YouTube does not have footage of Harmon Killebrew’s guest appearance on “Step By Step” does not mean he didn’t sign Brendan’s baseball after some other player acted like a jerk. (Oh, it happened.)
At the end of this historic first celebrity softball classic, Vin Scully described it as, “one of the more forgettable games of the year.” To hear Vin Scully, the most trusted name in baseball, spout such a bold-faced untruth should be reason enough to watch this forgotten classic. Vin has been wrong since every now and then, but never so egregiously.
