Angels to host 2010 All-Star Game

05/23/2008 11:56 AM ET
Angels to host 2010 All-Star Game
Club will be home to Midsummer Classic for third time
By Barry M. Bloom / MLB.com

The Angels and the city of Anaheim have been selected to host the 2010 All-Star Game.

The news was first reported Friday by the Los Angeles Times.

Commissioner Bud Selig is expected to make the announcement at a press conference at Angel Stadium on Wednesday, marking the fourth time the game will be played in the Los Angeles area since the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. The game is scheduled to be played on July 13, 2010.

The Angels, who expanded into the American League in 1961, have hosted the game twice, in 1967 and 1989. It'll be a first for the club, though, under the ownership of Arte Moreno, who purchased the team from Disney five years ago.

The decision has been in the works since last summer, when Selig said that the 2010 game and its three days of festivities certainly would go to an AL team. After Pittsburgh and San Francisco of the National League hosted back-to-back games in 2006 and 2007, Selig said he was determined to go back to the traditional rotation of one year at an AL site and the next at an NL site.

The New York Yankees are hosting this year's game on July 15 during what is the final season at the current Yankee Stadium. The 2009 game has already been awarded to the Cardinals, who will be in their fourth season in Busch Stadium III.

The Angels applied for the 2008 game, but Selig opted for the sentimental value of playing that one in the Bronx, where the new Yankee Stadium will open across the street from the old one in time for the 2009 season.

Aside from the '08 game in New York and 1999 in Boston's Fenway Park, Selig has used the All-Star Game to highlight many of the newer stadiums. Since the early 1990s, all the new ones in the AL have hosted a game, beginning with what was then called Toronto's Skydome in 1991. Subsequently, All-Star Games have been played in Baltimore, Cleveland, Texas, Seattle, Chicago, and Detroit.

A new ballpark in Minneapolis is slated to open for the 2010 season; the A's have a new yard on the drawing board in Fremont, Calif., that could be ready early in the next decade, and the Rays are proposing a new one on the waterfront in St. Petersburg. Selig has promised to consider awarding the 2012 game to Kansas City once renovations to Kauffman Stadium are complete.

There are plenty of choices in the NL, with new ballparks already open in Phoenix, San Diego, Philadelphia and Cincinnati that haven't played host to the game. Plus, Washington, D.C.'s new yard opened this year, Citi Field will replace New York's Shea Stadium in 2009 and a new one in Miami is slated for a 2011 inaugural.

Newer NL parks in Denver, Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and San Francisco have already staged the midsummer game.

The Dodgers haven't hosted an All-Star Game since 1980, the only time it was played at Dodger Stadium, which year-by-year has been undergoing a major renovation since Frank and Jamie McCourt purchased the team from News Corp. just prior to the 2004 season.

The Angels have hosted the game twice in different configurations of what was then called Anaheim Stadium, which was originally built for baseball only, was expanded for football, and then was reconstituted into a baseball-only facility.

The NL won the 1967 game, 2-1, when Tony Perez homered off Catfish Hunter in the top of the 15th inning. Tom Seaver closed it in the bottom of the inning, thus ending the longest game in All-Star history. Perez was named the Most Valuable Player.

Twenty-two years later, on July 11, 1989, Bo Jackson and Wade Boggs hit back-to-back homers to open the bottom of the first inning off NL starter Rick Reuschel as the AL prevailed, 5-3. Jackson, then a two-sport player who was a star running back for the Los Angeles Raiders, was the MVP.

Barry M. Bloom is a national reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

Wonder if the Tigers will get another All Star Game in the next 10-20 years

They just had it in 1989. They don't need it again. The Diamondbacks have never hosted it and they got a new stadium and everything. What gives?

I don't know

dude..u always have problems with southern california.. southern california owns northern california lol ...GO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

i live 30 mins from Angel Stadium

can't wait to gooooooo