Night Owl Cards

The last time the Dodgers hosted an All-Star Game, my friends and I were fascinated by a new concept called "cable television." It was the summer of 1980. I had recently watched "The Empire Strikes Back" at the movie theater. There were Olympic Games coming up, but no one was paying attention; the U.S. wasn't going. The most recent Olympics, the winter ones, had been held five months earlier in tiny Lake Placid, N.Y. I had no idea where that was at the time. In 1980, gas was less than $1.20 a gallon and a first-class stamp was 15 cents. Something called "CNN" introduced people to the idea of "24-hour news." On July 8 of that year, at my grandmother's house in Buffalo, I watched the All-Star Game on ABC from Los Angeles. Albert Pujols was six months old. Venus Williams was not even a month old. And Kim Kardashian wouldn't be born for three more months. And the Dodgers haven't hosted an All-Star Game since. In that time...