Major League Baseball’s All-Star media cattle drive.

The day before the MLB All-Star Game in St. Louis at Busch Stadium, I was sent to the Riverfront Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown St. Louis to cover the myriad of press conferences that lead up to the big game. First, there was the press conference where they brought out the two managers and starting pitchers and talked about the starting lineup. Next was the one of much anticipation: the National league player availability conference in which this year’s All-Stars sat at individual tables in a large room and the various media organizations got the chance to have at them one by one.
As you can guess, there was an extraordinary amount of international media there. (I counted at least 25 members of the Japanese press alone). Outside the closed doors of the room there was a press buildup of camera operators, television correspondents, radio producers, boom microphone operators and their sound engineers, pen-and-pad scribblers and still photographers like me. The crowd was densely packed and in close company, I thought; so much so that I was close enough to hear a conversation among one news crew comparing this event to last year’s in New York City: “This crowd in St. Louis is nothing compared to last year in New York. This is not nearly as bad. You needed to know karate moves ancd may have needed to kick some butt just to get your own space there,” one of them said. But to me, it was frenzied enough. But in a good way.
I don’t mind a crowd. I never have. So to me it was quite exhilarating to be in the mix when the doors opened and the race was on.
Tags: All-Star, busch stadium, Christian Gooden, Major League Baseball, pdallstar, post-dispatch, Riverfront Hyatt Regency, st. louis, st. louis cardinals