Per history.com, on July 6, 1933, Major League Baseball’s first All Star Game took place at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. The brainchild of a determined sports editor, the event was designed to bolster the sport and improve its reputation during the darkest years of the Great Depression. Originally billed as a one-time “Game of the Century,” it has now become a permanent and much-loved fixture of the baseball season.
Per another journalist – who, for the record, wasn’t even selected to the All Star team the year his dad served as one of the coaches, thus securing his own place in history as the only kid baseball player not selected to the All Star team the year his dad served as one of the coaches – Arlington Today magazine’s All Star edition has contributed to helping him get over his great depression. I mean, whose Dad doesn’t select his kid to the Little League All Star team?
Our All Star issue is one of the highlights of this publication’s “season,” in that it represents the ideal melding of the two most important elements in publishing: readers and the people/places/things they read about.
For nearly a decade, we’ve let our readers tell us, via an online poll that runs every spring, just which entities in the Arlington/Mansfield/Grand Prairie area most tickle their fancies.
They share which eateries make them say, “yum.” They offer evidence about legal professionals who not only represent them well but represent their profession well, as well. They promote health care providers who help them talk, hear, see, breathe and sleep better.
They even tell us where they go when somebody tells them to take a hike. (Spoiler alert: They’ve told us the same place every time we’ve asked them to go to our virtual polling place at arlingtontoday.com to select a favorite local park.)
Mainly what they tell us, though, is that this great city and region has a lot of “favorites,” even if some of them aren’t listed in the All Star report that begins on page 30. Every spring, our diligent vote tabulators sort through literally thousands of cast ballots – and then sort through them again, because (A) they want to ensure accuracy, and (B) they want to revel in the notion that literally thousands of ballots were cast. That means our readers really care about the services and service providers that make their lives better. It also means that they are invested in what we at this magazine have been trying to do from Day One: Celebrate Arlington and the surrounding burgs.
I write all that to say this, knowing full well that many of you have skipped this page and jumped right to the All Star section: We appreciate our readers’ passion. And we congratulate its beneficiaries.
(Oh, and I forgive you, Dad. More or less.)
