Bo definitely knows baseball

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Today: In 1989, two-sport star Bo Jackson of the Kansas City Royals tendered one of the most amazing All-Star performances ever, including hitting a tape-measure home run off NL starter Rick Reuschel.

To put the 1989 All-Star Game in historical context, baseball was in the midst of investigating Pete Rose's betting proclivities, Wade Boggs was embroiled in the Margo Adams affair and Nike was just beginning to promote the hyperbole out of a football/baseball phenomenon named Bo Jackson.

Jackson entered the All-Star Game leading the American League with 22 home runs, which in itself makes the late 1980s seem like another lifetime. By the time the game ended, Jackson had stamped himself as the future of baseball, though few suspected just how tenuous that future would be.

"He's redefining the game as we speak," Tony Gwynn said afterward. "Bo can do anything. He's scary."

In one of the most amazing individual performances ever seen in the mid-summer classic, Jackson led off the bottom of the first with a tape-measure home run off NL starter Rick Reuschel.

He made a great running catch of a Pedro Guerrero looper to squelch a National League rally. He beat out an apparent double-play ball, allowing the go-ahead run to score in the American League's eventual 5-3 victory.

He stole a base, making him the second player in All-Star history - Willie Mays was the first - to homer and steal a base in the same game. And he added a single for good measure.

"How many ways can you say he's great?" asked Cardinal shortstop Ozzie Smith in the losing clubhouse after the AL won two games in succession for the first time since 1957-58.

His accomplishments, and the wonder they engendered, in retrospect merely point out the shame of Jackson's career, cut short by a hip injury suffered in January 1991, when he was tackled in the NFL playoffs against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Though Jackson continued his career, even after receiving an artificial hip, he was never close to being the same player who electrified the baseball world that July night.

His home run went an estimated 448 feet to dead center, amazing since Jackson said he "only got a piece" of Reuschel's sinker.

"We were sitting around, slapping hands and saying to each other, `Geez, where are you going to pitch him,' " Dodger reliever Jay Howell said in the bullpen during the game.

"Now I know what I've got to do," Pirates slugger Bobby Bonilla said. "I've got to go home this winter and put a Nautilus machine in my backyard."

Remember, much of America had never seen Jackson play baseball, mired as he was in the obscurity of Kansas City. This was his coming out, and he came out with the game's MVP award, not to mention the label of the next big thing in baseball, just as he had been in football.

"Well, it might be something I can tell my grandkids later on," he said. "But for me, I just live for the present. I really hate it when people call me the next Willie Mays or the next anybody. If you start believing your headlines, it can get you out of the game in a hurry."

The game, the first to feature a designated hitter despite the fact that the rule was 16 years old, had other notable moments. Boggs, playing not far from the Anaheim hotel where he had first met Adams five years earlier, followed Jackson's homer with one of his own.

Don Mattingly, who had been 0-for-8 in five previous All-Star Games, had a double.

Nolan Ryan, returning to the site of his glory days with the Angels, earned the victory by striking out three in two scoreless innings. Ryan, greeted with an extended standing ovation, became at 42, the second-oldest pitcher to appear in an All-Star Game, trailing only Satchel Paige.

"I think of all the All-Star Games, this is probably the most meaningful," Ryan said. "There's a good chance it could be my last All-Star Game."

It was. A 22-year-old rising star named John Smoltz, the youngest player in the game, was the losing pitcher.

Former President Ronald Reagan, 78, joined Vin Scully in the NBC booth to offer color commentary for an inning.

And the game was particularly memorable for Expos reliever Tim Burke, who worked two scoreless innings, the only NL pitcher unscathed, then rushed to Los Angeles International Airport for a midnight flight to Guatemala, where he and his wife, Christine, adopted a two-year-old boy.

Burke has his own reasons for remembering the '89 game. For almost everyone else, it will be forever stamped as the night we found out that Bo Knows Baseball, too.

Larry Stone can be reached at 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com.