MORE THAN A GAME
Two-day All-Star celebration begins Monday with FanFest
TROY, N.Y. » Some of the best and brightest young players in professional baseball will converge on the Collar City this week for a taste of the big league spotlight.
The Tri- City ValleyCats will host the 2017 New YorkPenn League All-Star Game on Tuesday night at Joseph L. Bruno Stadium on the Hudson Valley Community College campus. The game, however, is just one part of a two- day celebration that will also include an appearance by a Baseball Hall of Famer and a festival featuring a pair of award-winning country music acts.
A team of stars from the league’s southern teams will meet a team of north- ern stars — including ValleyCats Reggie Johnson, J. J. Matijevic, Andy Pineda and Nathan Thompson — at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Pre-game festivities begin at 4 p.m., when the gates open. The all-stars will sign autographs from
4:10 to 5:20 p.m., with the Slidin’ Dirty Derby, a home run-hitting contest featuring eight of the league’s top sluggers to benefit the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
Earlier in the day, the ValleyCats will host an AllStar Luncheon in collaboration with the Capital Region Chamber from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Desmond Hotel and Conference Center on Albany Shaker Road. The guest speaker will be Boston Red Sox great Jim Rice, the only player in major league history to record more than 200 hits while hitting 39 or more home runs for three consecutive seasons. His best season came in 1978, when he was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player, and he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009.
The celebration actually begins a day earlier, however, when Riverfront Park in downtown Troy will play host to an All-Star FanFest. The festival will feature food and a host of actvities, with local country music Skeeter Creek taking the stage
at 5:30, followed by the Eli Young Band, with the allstar teams introduced between acts. The ValleyCats last hosted the All- Star Game in 2008, when more than 6,000 fans watched Tri- City’s David Flores take home most valuable player honors by hitting a walk-off double in the bottom of the 9th to lead a team of stars from National League affiliates past a team of American League future stars, 4-3. Among the players to take the field were future big leaguers J.B. Shuck, David Phelps, Pat Venditte and Chase d’Arnaud.
FanFest is free and open to the public, with parking available after 5 p.m. in the Uncle Sam Parking Garage across from the park on River Street, as well as the Green Island Bridge Lot on River Street north of the Green Island Bridge, the State Street Garage on Front Street and the 5th Avenue Garage at the corner of 5th Avenue and Broadway.
Tickets for the All- Star Luncheon are $45 for chamber members, $60 for the public. and are available at www.capitalregionchamber. com/events, while tickets for the game, including pregame activities, range from $10 to $15 and are available at www.tcvalleycats.com.