Tuesday Open Line


Major league baseball takes a pause in its regular schedule today to play its 84th all-star game. This year’s event is being held at Citi Field in New York, home of the Mets. The first midsummer all-star game was played on July 6, 1933, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. A homer by Babe Ruth helped the American League defeat the National League, 4-to-2. In 1933, all 16 teams in the major leagues were clustered in the northeast of the country, with St. Louis being the southern most and farthest west outpost of the national pastime. That year, the mean center of the U.S. population was in southwestern Indiana. The number of major league teams has almost doubled since then to represent the far corners of the continental U.S., pulled by population growth and migration that puts the mean center in south-central Missouri. Profile America is in its 17th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.