Baseball’s 96th All-Star Game will be played in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. To say that the Midsummer Classic is not as popular as it used to be is to state a fact; constant television exposure and interleague play has dulled the excitement of seeing the best players in the American and National leagues go at it in an exhibition game.

It wasn’t always like that, of course. For a time, the All-Star Game was one of the biggest events on the baseball calendar, a must-see showcase for fans around the country.

But the very first All-Star Game in 1933 — which wasn’t even called the All-Star Game then — did not come about because fans were clamoring for it.

The first All-Star Game came about because the city of Chicago was holding a World’s Fair (officially known as the “Century of Progress International Exposition” for Chicago’s 100th birthday) and wanted a sporting event to be the centerpiece.

The first All-Star Game was called “The Game of the Century” and was played on July 6 at Comiskey Park before a sellout crowd of 47,595.

Yankees legend Babe Ruth, who was 38 years old and near the end of his career, homered to lead the AL to a 4-2 victory.

The game was more than just a sporting event. America was still reeling from the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his first months as president. Both the Chicago exposition and the sporting event (other rejected ideas were a championship boxing match or a horse racing event) were meant to show that the country could come back from the unfathomable depths of the worst financial crisis in world history.

It was a hope, not a certainty, that the game would be a success — or that it would be played again the next year, let alone well into the 21st century.

“Edward Kelly, the mayor of Chicago, just wanted a sporting event,” Randall Sullivan, author of the new book “The First All-Star Game: Babe Ruth, FDR, and America at the Crossroads,” told Newsday in a telephone interview. “He was just casting about for ideas. He went to Robert McCormick, the publisher at the [Chicago] Tribune. McCormick said, ‘My sports editor is the best promoter in the country. Let’s bring him in and see what he thinks we should do.’

“Arch Ward was the one who said, ‘No, it’s got to be a baseball game between the best players from the American League and the best players from the National League,’ which at the time was a novel concept.”

Ward put the whole thing together in a few months. It wasn’t easy. First he had to convince team owners and commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to hold the game. Then he had to convince the players it was worth their time (proceeds from the game went to support retired players).

Then Ward had to make an appeal to fans in Chicago and around the country to support the game. An empty stadium might have been the end of the novel concept.

Ward indeed was a master promoter: He devised the unique concept of allowing fans to vote on the teams’ starters through printed ballots in 55 participating newspapers.

The fans, as they have throughout the years, didn’t get every selection right. And the venerable managers of the teams, John McGraw for the NL and Connie Mack for the AL, ignored some of the fans’ picks and inserted their own starters.

The rosters included 18 players for each league; only three per team were pitchers.

The rosters for the 2025 MLB All-Star Game included 34 players per team, including 12 pitchers.

The NL players in 1933 wore uniforms that had “National League” stitched across their chests. The AL players wore their individual team uniforms. The Yankees on the AL roster (starters Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ben Chapman and pitcher Lefty Gomez, and reserves Bill Dickey and Tony Lazzeri, neither of whom played), had numbers on their backs, but no “NY” or any other logo on the fronts.

“There was more buildup to this game than there’d ever been to a sporting event in the U.S. up to that time,” Sullivan said, “because everyone believed it was a one-off.”

Tickets sold out fast. The ballpark — which was picked over Wrigley Field in a coin flip but also might have surreptitiously been chosen by White Sox fan Ward because it seated 15,000 more fans than the Cubs’ home — opened early to allow fans in for batting practice.

“The players themselves didn’t realize what exactly they were getting into until they arrived,” Sullivan said. “Normally they’d come out for batting practice, there’d be a handful of spectators and people trickling into the stadium. When they went out that day, the entire stadium was packed, every seat filled, and so batting practice became part of the show.”

The top showman in baseball was Ruth, who didn’t disappoint. In the third inning, with the AL holding a 1-0 lead on an RBI single by Gomez, “The Sultan of Swat” sent a two-run home run deep into the rightfield seats off lefthander “Wild” Bill Hallahan.

Video footage of the swing and Ruth’s trip around the bases still exists on the internet (it today is narrated by Bob Costas on MLB.com).

The Babe’s ample gut can be seen as he rounds the bases as owner of the first home run in All-Star Game history.

That was how it should have been, a perfect moment in what for baseball — and for a battered country that needed something to cheer about — was an absolutely perfect day.

They held another one the next summer at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan and have every year since except 1945 (World War II) and 2020 (COVID).

“This game,” Sullivan said, “was part of — and I think a significant part of — this moment when America began to make a comeback.”