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Leave it to baseball to create this sort of unspeakable contradiction. The North beat the South on Tuesday night, and 8,367 people in Greensboro were happy about it.

The annual conflict of the South Atlantic League ended without incident when the Northern Division, which includes the Grasshoppers, earned a 13-4 victory in the league's 49th All-Star game at NewBridge Bank Park.

A geographically imperfect beast, the South Atlantic League brought delegates from suburban Cleveland, South Jersey and South Georgia to the Gate City and a sold-out stadium on a perfect summer evening.

Game most valuable player Bill Rhinehart of the Hagerstown Suns went 3-for-3 with a two-run homer and an RBI single, and Zelous Wheeler of the West Virginia Power was both justifiably zealous and clearly powerful.

"I like this environment," said Wheeler, who hit one opposite-field home run to right and nearly got another. "It gets me pumped up and motivated to perform for the crowd."

Rhinehart, whose 56 RBIs are good for fourth among all Class A players, has already had an eventful week. He and his team bused from Eastlake, Ohio, to Hagerstown after Sunday's game. Rhinehart and the Suns' radio announcer then drove here Monday from Maryland. They'll go back to Hagerstown today and meet the team for a three-hour trip to Salisbury, Md., where the Suns open the second half of the season Thursday against the Delmarva Shorebirds.

Not that he's griping.

"I enjoyed the whole atmosphere," Rhinehart said. "I wanted to show the fans what the North can do. And we did that fairly well."

The home crowd saw all three Hoppers get in the game. The first to appear, relief pitcher A.J. Battisto, met with an unpleasant fate when Jason Heyward of the Rome Braves hit his first pitch off the scoreboard in right-center in the second inning, but he settled down thereafter.

Corey Madden entered the game with two out in the eighth and promptly ended the inning with a strikeout. He then faced the leadoff man in the ninth and struck him out, which makes sense. The Alaskan has fanned 63 batters in 39 innings.

"Probably the most fun time pitching I've had in my life," Madden said. "Home crowd. We were doing pretty well as a team. It was good to get out there and get my time to shine, I guess."

North manager Aaron Holbert, whose Lake County Captains edged the Grasshoppers for the first-half title, asked Garrett Parcell to finish things off, and Parcell fooled Abraham Almonte of Charleston for another strikeout.

Conventional wisdom says good pitching beats good hitting, but Tuesday was a night of the unexpected on multiple fronts. The North banged out 18 hits, none of which came from Michael Burgess, who had a good excuse for going 0-for-3. Perhaps he was fatigued from his performance in the Home Run Derby, in which he hit 16 long balls -- four of which cleared the netting and landed on or near Eugene Street -- on 38 swings.

The sight of the backdrop in right field reminded him of a game he played for Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Fla.

"Something in my mind popped back to my junior year (of high school) when I was hitting at the University of Tampa," Burgess said. "They have a net there, too, and it's just as high. I just got in that groove and kept going."

Contact Rob Daniels at 373-7028 or rob.daniels@news-record.com