Starting pitcher for the AL is Toronto’s Dylan Cease, the first Blue Jay to do so since 2009, when Roy Halladay did so. On the mound for the NL will be Cristopher Sánchez of the hometown Phillies. Weirdly, the last Phillies pitcher to start the All-Star Game was… Roy Halladay, in 2011.
This is the 96th All-Star Game, and you can watch on Fox. Coverage started at 3:30 pm Arizona time, but I’m scheduling this to avoid most of the large quantity of bloviating before the game starts, some time after 5 pm. It’s the first time the contest has been at Citizens Bank Park: the last occasion in Philadelphia was exactly thirty years ago, at Veterans Stadium. No D-backs were involved in that contest. 🙂 Though future player Roberto Alomar was. The AL currently leads the series with a 48–45–2 (.516) record, and a 388–380 run advantage. The leagues have alternated wins the last four times: in 2025, the NL prevailed in the first ever swing-off tiebreaker, after blowing a 6-0 lead.
With Citizens Bank Park crossed off the list, that just leaves new Yankee Stadium, Tropicana Field and Sutter Health Park as the only currently active ballparks never to have held an All-Star Game. The last-named – home of the [THIS SPACE FOR RENT] Athletics, in case you were wondering – is for obvious reasons, and the Yankees did have the ASG in their old park relatively recently, in 2008. But the lack of an ASG for our expansion siblings, fifteen years after Arizona got one, is a little odd. I imagine MLB is using it as pressure: “Get a new park and we’ll give you an All-Star Game!” The hope is for the Rays to get a new park for 2029, but I’m severely doubtful.
We will see when and if the two Arizona Diamondbacks on the NL roster get into the game: Corbin Carroll and Eduardo Rodriguez. I’d be particularly happy to see ERod, finally making it into the All-Star Game in his 11th season. Obviously, the record for most seasons before appearing in an All-Star Game belongs to Babe Ruth, who only got selected in his 20th season. That would be because there wasn’t an All-Star Game for the first nineteen. But excluding those early days, only three players have had a longer wait than Eduardo’s 11 seasons to get into the Midsummer Classic, lead by Raul Ibanez who was in his 14th season when picked in 2009.