Ron Kantowski says for him the 2008 All-Star Game, Yankee Stadium’s last, will be most memorable for the appearance of a Las Vegan and UNLV alum

By Ron Kantowski

Thursday, July 17, 2008 | 2 a.m.

So I’m sitting on the couch, in the 11th, 12th or 13th inning of the All-Star Game. I can’t be sure which inning it is because, like Tim McCarver in the booth, I’m nodding off. My wife, who has been pacing for 45 minutes — or roughly one extra inning — because she wants to watch some reality show where a woman tumbles over Niagara Falls with an arrow stuck in her back and lives to tell about it, strolls into the room to hear Joe Buck trying to explain what Ryan Ludwick of Las Vegas, UNLV and the St. Louis Cardinals is doing in the All-Star Game.

But Buck, like all the fans who went home early, really doesn’t seem into it, either, because he’s not exactly telling the story in chronological order, or at least is getting his modifiers out of whack. So when my wife walks in, all she hears is Joe Buck saying that Ludwick called his pregnant wife, Joanie, and says, “We did it!”

“I guess that was sort of obvious,” my wife says.

This is what I will remember most about the final All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium. That Ryan Ludwick, a kid — make that a 30-year-old man — from Las Vegas made the All-Star Game, and Joe Buck, the son of a Hall of Fame broadcaster and one of the best in the business himself, couldn’t explain that development any better than the rest of us.

It was just two years ago that Ludwick played in his first All-Star Game. Only it was the Triple-A one. In Toledo. You can get to Yankee Stadium from Toledo, Ohio, if you don’t mind sleeping on a bench at the Greyhound station, because the next bus doesn’t arrive until the morning.

Ludwick didn’t complain about the most-expenses-paid trip to Toledo because a couple of months before that, he was out of baseball. He had been injured so often — knee surgeries, hip injuries, wrist surgeries — not even the Rangers wanted him. Nor the Indians. Nor anybody else, because he cleared waivers. So he signed a minor league contract with Detroit. He made it as far as Toledo with the Tigers. They didn’t want him, either — he never got promoted.

So he signed another minor league contract, with the Cardinals, last year. He’s making $411,000 this season. The major league minimum is $390,000.

Not even Cardinals manager Tony La Russa would take credit for seeing something in Ludwick nobody else could, and he gets credit for everything, because he’s a freakin’ baseball genius, although he bats his pitcher eighth.

Even Ludwick’s jersey number suggests he should be throwing batting practice instead of taking it. Forty-seven. Who wears No. 47 and plays the outfield? Forty-seven even looks bad on a relief pitcher. Except Jesse Orosco. For some reason, it looked good on him.

“Sorry, kid,” you can almost hear the Cardinals’ clubhouse manager say in a gruff voice as he puffs on a cigar and makes sure that Albert Pujols’ No. 5 is hanging from the left side of his locker instead of the right, because that’s the way Big Guy likes it. “I’d give you No. 6 but it’s hanging in Stan Musial’s den. ’Fraid 47’s all we got.”

Ludwick took it, because wearing 47 in St. Louis is better than wearing 7 in Memphis.

But there’s still no rhyme for a guy whose career minor league batting average over nine seasons is an ordinary .270; no reason that a guy who gets hurt getting out of bed in the morning should not only stay injury-free, but be hitting .289 with 21 home runs and 65 RBIs at the All-Star break.

That’s what prompted a call to Mike Gomez, Ludwick’s high school coach at Eldorado and later, after it opened, at Durango High School. High school coaches are like Bruce Willis in the “Sixth Sense.” They’re even better than baseball geniuses at seeing things about players nobody else can, or at least taking credit for it 10 or 12 years later.

Not Gomez.

“Is there any one thing, a story, an anecdote, that defines what kind of player he was?” I asked.

Not really, Gomez said.

“What about a picture? Do you have a photo of you and Ryan together, something you might have saved?”

No, nothing like that, Gomez said. He said there was some old stuff in the bottom of a drawer at Durango he hadn’t looked at it in a while, but it sounded like needle-in-a-haystack stuff, so I didn’t pursue it.

Put it this way, Gomez said. “In 19 years of coaching I’ve had roughly 20 kids who were drafted and only two, Eric (Ludwick, Ryan’s older brother) and Ryan, made it to the big leagues. Eric and Ryan. That’s it.”

Ah, Eric Ludwick. Like his kid brother, Eric also played for UNLV and the Cardinals after playing for Gomez (although he skipped the stop at Modesto). Unlike Ryan, Eric was drafted out of high school, by the Mets, in the second round. Here’s about all you need to know about the Ludwicks after they became pros: Eric was part of the trade that brought Mark McGwire to the Cardinals. Ryan was part of the trade that brought Carlos Pena and Mike Venafro to the A’s.

Which sort of brings us to the 15th inning Tuesday night when both Tim McCarver and I were awakened by the crack of the bat.

The ball sailed on a line toward left field where Ryan Ludwick, No. 47, hesitated, then came charging in to make a beautiful diving catch.

At Yankee Stadium.

In the All-Star Game.

With all due respect to Joe Buck and Ludwick’s pregnant wife, he did it all by himself.