The 1952 All-Star Game did not really end at Shibe Park.
It stopped there.
That is the better way to understand the strangest Midsummer Classic Philadelphia ever hosted — and the wonderfully odd sequel the Phillies staged 20 years later at Veterans Stadium. Baseball, after all, has always had a soft spot for unfinished business. In Philadelphia, it also has a soft spot for promotions that sound half ridiculous until they become part of the city’s baseball folklore.
On July 8, 1952, the National League beat the American League, 3-2, in five innings at Shibe Park. Rain had soaked the city before the game, delayed the start and eventually forced the only rain-shortened All-Star Game in major-league history. The box score became official. The game became history. But in Philadelphia, where baseball memory tends to linger longer than common sense, the missing four innings apparently bothered someone enough to build an Old-Timers Game around it two decades later.
That someone was Bill Giles.
On Aug. 19, 1972, before a Phillies game against the Astros at Veterans Stadium, the Phillies staged an Old-Timers Game billed as the “completion of the 1952 All-Star Game,” according to Larry Shenk’s Phillies Alumni account for MLB.com. It was classic Giles: part nostalgia, part theater, part wink to the paying crowd.
The scoreboard picked up the old game as if time had simply paused for 20 years. National League 3, American League 2. Sixth inning.
That was the gag. But it was a good one because the original game had been such an odd piece of Philadelphia baseball history.
The 1952 game had belonged to local pitchers. Curt Simmons, the Phillies left-hander, started for the National League and threw three scoreless innings at Shibe Park. Bobby Shantz, the 5-foot-6 Athletics ace in the middle of his MVP season, struck out Whitey Lockman, Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial in order in the fifth inning. Then the rain returned, and the day was over.
Twenty years later, the Phillies tried to give the afternoon the ending it never received.
The National League old-timers included Hank Sauer, Bobby Thomson, Enos Slaughter, Pee Wee Reese, Granny Hamner and Robin Roberts. Shantz, representing the American League side, took the mound for the first inning of the Old-Timers Game — displayed on the board as the sixth inning of the 1952 All-Star Game.
It did not go quite like 1952.
Back then, Shantz had needed 13 pitches to strike out three of the National League’s best hitters. In 1972, he gave up five runs in the “sixth.” The American League old-timers scored only once. So the official-not-official completion ended with the National League winning again, this time 8-3.
It was not exactly baseball justice. It was better than that. It was baseball comedy with a Philadelphia zip code.
Art Morrow of The Philadelphia Inquirer captured the spirit perfectly, writing, “In all truth, the players performed like all stars at least as long as they didn’t have to run.”
That line works because Old-Timers Games were never really about performance. They were about recognition. They gave fans a chance to see names that once filled summer nights. They gave retired players one more walk out of the dugout. And in this case, they let Philadelphia finish a baseball story that had been interrupted by rain before many of the people in the Vet that night were old enough to remember it.
Ferris Fain, the former Philadelphia Athletics first baseman, delivered the other perfect quote from the night.
“I choked up so much tonight the bottom of the bat hit my belt,” Fain said.
That, too, feels like the point.
The 1972 “completion” did not change the 1952 All-Star Game. The National League already had its win. Hank Sauer already had his decisive home run. Simmons and Shantz already had their Philadelphia moments. The rain-shortened game already had its odd place in baseball history.
But the Old-Timers Game gave the story something else: a coda.
It connected Shibe Park to Veterans Stadium. It connected the Phillies and Athletics era to the franchise’s modern ballpark age. It brought back Roberts, Hamner, Shantz and Fain, figures from a time when Philadelphia was still a two-team baseball city and the A’s had not yet left for Kansas City.
That is why the stunt mattered.
Because Philadelphia baseball history is not always neat. Sometimes it is rain delays, muddy infields, abandoned afternoons and old men laughing their way through one more inning.
The 1952 All-Star Game ended after five.
Philadelphia finished it anyway.
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