CHICAGO -- Who writes these scripts?

A guy on a last-place team (Mr. Hank Blalock, ladies and gentlemen) hits a home run that won't come down for 3½ months, determines home-field advantage in the World Series and sets an All-Star Game record for most October hotel reservations canceled before they were ever made.

	Eric Gagne is the latest award-winner pitcher to wear Dodger blue.

Who writes these scripts?

A relief pitcher who hadn't blown a save in 11 months (Eric Gagne) somehow blows one in the most momentous exhibition game in the history of humanity.

Who writes these scripts?

The National League assembles one of the great All-Star bullpens ever to spend an evening spitting sunflower seeds together, hands its unhittable three-headed Wagner-Gagne-Smoltz closer committee a three-run lead in the seventh inning, and still loses.

Who writes these scripts?

Well, Bud Selig Productions Inc. may not have scripted this fairy tale. But thanks to the slightly lesser known Hank Blalock Studios, Bud and his beleaguered baseball buddies sure got themselves the perfect All-Star Game plot line, improbable as it may have been.

American League 7, National League 6. Cue the trumpets.

"You don't write 'em any better than that," Jason Giambi said. "Young kid comes up there and writes a storybook ending? It just doesn't get any better than that."

Well, for months now, we've been imagining this scenario, right? The fate of the entire baseball postseason being determined by some All-Star on a team buried 20 games out of first place? We'd talked about it. We'd thought about it. We'd laughed about it.

And then it happened.

It happened when Hank Blalock, 22 years old, marched up there against Eric Gagne, the ultimate dominator, a man whose last blown save occurred way, way, wayyyy back on Aug. 26. That was 58 appearances and 39 saves ago for Gagne. It was so long ago for Blalock that he was still playing for the Oklahoma RedHawks that day. (Got three hits against Memphis, if you're wondering.)

But Tuesday night, their paths converged in the spot-lit infield of U.S. Cellular Field. With two out in the eighth. And Gagne's team leading, 6-5. And the tying run on second base.

"I know exactly how good he is," Blalock said of Gagne, a man he'd never faced in his life. "He's had great success. He's a dominating pitcher. I just kind of ran into one."

	Blalock

He ran into a 3-and-1, here-it-is, try-and-hit-it fastball and pounded it 427 feet deep into the bleachers in right-center. And as that baseball left the bat, as it hung there in the summer night, as you realized what you were watching, it got hard to breathe for just a second there. Because this couldn't happen. But somehow, that didn't stop it from happening.

"As I was rounding third," said Toronto's Vernon Wells, whose RBI double off Gagne had just turned this into a one-run game, "I heard the crowd going crazy. And I knew what that meant. And I just got goosebumps. That was unbelievable."

We have 47,609 witnesses who saw Blalock run around the bases. But some day they'll have to convince Blalock that he did -- because he doesn't remember a single step.

"It went by so fast, I don't really remember running around," he said. "After something like that, you can't really feel your legs under you. You feel like you're floating around the bases. It was pretty cool."

But it was more than cool. It was just about unprecedented. For one thing, Blalock had never batted before in this, or any, All-Star Game. And in a game in which the managers -- especially AL manager Mike Scioscia -- paid more attention to matchups than in any All-Star Game in recent memory, Blalock found himself in a duel with the fire-breathing Gagne. Some fun.

"Of course," laughed AL manager Mike Scioscia, "I don't think anybody against Gagne is a good matchup."

But Blalock was also pinch-hitting (for starting third baseman Troy Glaus). Only three other All-Stars in history had ever hit a pinch home run in the first All-Star at-bat of their careers (Jeff Conine in 1995, Lee Mazzilli in 1979, George Altman in 1961). None of them were American Leaguers. And none was 22 years old, either.

And then there was The Gagne Factor. Since the home run the omnipotent Dodgers closer gave up in last year's All-Star Game to Alfonso Soriano, Gagne had pitched 79 times, faced more than 250 hitters and given up just three home runs.

He hadn't allowed three runs in an inning since July 22, 2000 -- 160 appearances ago. And he hadn't given up three extra-base hits in an inning in any game since he became a closer.

But he did all that in this All-Star Game. And now he has to plow through the rest of this season, knowing that those three runs and that gopherball to Blalock are not going away.

They're just hanging there in suspended animation, waiting for their chance to spring back to life in the third week of October, as soon as that World Series itinerary gets printed in every newspaper in America.

"I'll be thinking about it again in October. I know that," Gagne said. "But there's nothing I can do about it now. There's nothing I could change. Hopefully, it will be our team that gets to go out there in the World Series and say, 'Now we get a chance to pick him up.' But I know this: Whoever makes the World Series will think about it more than I will."

	“	We were pretty confident that this one was in the bag. But that's baseball. ”
		— Billy Wagner

Ahhh ... who writes these scripts?

We try our best to analyze these games before they happen. That's the fun of sports. And if you analyzed this game, the surest plot-line scenario of them all was that the National League only had to get through the sixth inning with a lead.

Because after that, the American League had that three-headed bullpen monster waiting for it. And the odds of the AL beating Billy Wagner, Gagne and John Smoltz were probably worse than the odds of Luis Castillo winning the Home Run Derby.

"We were pretty confident," Wagner said, "that this one was in the bag. But that's baseball."

Yeah, in baseball, there's no clock to run out. You may have heard that someplace. In baseball, there's no way to ice the puck. You may have heard that someplace, too. But Wagner, Gagne and Smoltz are better than stalling. They don't kill time. They just kill batting averages.

The three of them have saved 90 games this year -- and blown five saves. Their combined ERA is 1.75.

"Knowing those three guys were coming," said Luis Gonzalez, "I wouldn't have wanted to be on that side."

But then Wagner did the unthinkable. He served up a seventh-inning home run to Giambi -- only the eighth home run Wagner had ever given up to a left-handed hitter.

"Aw, I've given up home runs to left-handers, and I've given up home runs to right-handers," Wagner said. "It's a long, distinguished line."

Well, distinguished, maybe. But long? Uh, 'fraid not. But once Giambi had finished rounding the bases, this was suddenly a 6-4 game. And getting more interesting by the moment.

But then came the eighth, and out stomped Gagne -- as Smoltz stretched to prepare for the save opportunity he'd be handed in the ninth. Until Garret Anderson doubled, and Vernon Wells knocked pinch-runner Melvin Mora in, and Hank Blalock did the impossible. What a story.

Only eight players off a last-place team were invited to this game. Only four of them got to play. So how could this happen -- a guy on a team going nowhere deciding the location of the most important baseball game of the year? Too crazy. Too perfect.

"Hey, I've got an idea," said Dmitri Young, of those really, really, really last-place Tigers. "Why doesn't Bud Selig come up with a new rule: Whoever gets home-field advantage in the World Series, if someone gets the hit that wins the All-Star Game from some other team, they have to give a little share for the guy who hit it?

"Get that in your column," Young chuckled, "and watch it blow up."

Well, a Series share might be hard to float. But Giambi -- whose team has a definite shot to profit from Hank Blalock's All-Star homer -- is willing to explore other forms of generosity.

"If that World Series goes to Game 7," Giambi said, "and whoever ends up in it wins Game 7 at home, they definitely ought to send Hank Blalock a 12-pack of something."

Hey, a 12-pack. Or a case. Or possibly half a warehouse. A guy most of America had never seen swing a bat hit a home run that will still be floating in the week before Halloween. And we guarantee there will at least 25 National Leaguers who will like this rule a lot less in October than they liked it before Tuesday's National Anthem.

"Here's my statement," said the Cardinals' Scott Rolen. "Unfortunately, this time it counted."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.