I’m still reading the coverage about the late Jim Bouton. He led an extraordinary life. Though there was one game played yesterday, Major League Baseball fully starts its second half today with a complete schedule.

When we went to the Braves-Nationals game a few weeks back we took in some of the photographs and memorabilia on display showcasing the long history of baseball in the nation’s capital. It goes back well over a century. I don’t recall the above image being there but I stumbled across it yesterday and found it intriguing. It is John F. Kennedy and Stan Musial at the 1962 All-Star Game in the then sparkling new District of Columbia Stadium, renamed RFK Stadium after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy six years later.

From 1959-62 Major League Baseball played two All-Star Games each season. The proceeds went to the players’ pension fund. This was the first one, played on July 10, 1962. Musial had campaigned for Kennedy in the 1960 election, unlike the Red Sox’s Ted Williams, who was a Nixon man. LBJ is there in the right hand corner. From 1964-67, after the Kennedy assassination, Musial was chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I remember the Council vividly, and earning a patch in elementary school for doing five chin ups or what have you.

Kennedy was to throw out the first pitch. The AT BAT 24 on the scoreboard was the Pirates’s Dick Groat. Musial was forty-one years old when this photograph was taken and playing in his twenty-second All-Star Game. He came in as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and broke a scoreless tie to give the National League a lead it would not relinquish. The Senior Circuit won the game 3-1.

Enjoy the second half.

(image/JFK Presidential Library and Museum)