Profile America — Tuesday, July 15th. Major league baseball pauses today to play its 85th All-Star Game.
Today’s event is being held at Target Field in Minneapolis, home of the Minnesota Twins. The first All-Star Game was played on July 6, 1933, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. A homer by Babe Ruth helped the American League defeat the National League 4-2. In 1933, all 16 teams in the major leagues were clustered in the northeast of the country, with St. Louis being the southernmost and farthest west outpost of the national pastime. That year, the mean center of the U.S. population was in southwestern Indiana.
The number of major league teams has almost doubled since then to represent the far corners of the continental U.S., pulled by population growth and migration that puts the mean center in south-central Missouri. Profile America is in its 17th year as a Public Service of the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sources: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/events/all_star/y2014/index.jsp
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/mlb_asgrecaps_story_headline.jsp?story_page=recap_1933 http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/center-of-population.php
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