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July 7, 2008

Prospectus Today

All-Star Screw-Ups

by Joe Sheehan

The All-Star rosters were announced Sunday, accompanied by the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth. I’m as big a complainer about the picks as anyone, even though I know it’s a controversy that lasts about half of a news cycle. No one will care, by Wednesday, that Jason Bay or Johan Santana or John Lackey got jobbed.

Still, I think it’s worthwhile to go through the process, which is much more complex than it needs to be, to see which of the three selecting entities did a good job, and which may have dropped the ball. In some years, everyone does well; in others, such as this one, it becomes pretty clear where the system breaks down and creates undeserving All-Stars while keeping deserving ones on the sidelines.

For all the kvetching about the All-Star starters, the fans once again did a perfectly reasonable job with their assignment. If they didn’t necessarily alight on the best 17 players, they didn’t make any egregiously bad choices, especially when you consider the biases towards certain national brands and, as always, players off to good starts. As I have stated repeatedly, I would like to see a greater emphasis on pre-2007 performance, and on being an established star, because that’s my vision of the All-Star Game. The fans’ patterns are clear: the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs nabbed nine of the 17 slots, none of them particularly undeserved. Two Japanese veterans (one a Cub) were voted in, no doubt helped along by international online balloting. The other fan All-Stars were largely the players with the best traditional stats as of June 1 or so: Josh Hamilton, Lance Berkman, Hanley Ramirez, and Chase Utley all fit that bill. While there’s a perception that the fans rewarded young players, it seems to me that it was more about young players fitting into one of the pre-existing categories than a sea change in the process.

The players staked a claim to a piece of the selection process a few years ago, and continued to invite the question of why they bothered. It’s not clear what specialized knowledge they’re adding to the process; their selections are barely different from what you might get if you showed the leaders in the six triple crown categories to a reasonably savvy nine-year-old. Where they do differ doesn’t make an argument against the fourth grader.

What’s aggravating is that the players insist on weighting current-season performance so heavily. Virtually all of the All-Stars who are on the team thanks to the best three months of their lives are there because the players put them there. Ryan Ludwick, Nate McLouth, Ryan Dempster, Brian Wilson, and others—apparently, the NL voters think time began on March 30—are the kinds of "All-Stars" I’ve been railing against for years, the kind who had no case on April 15 and will probably have no case on August 15. Nevertheless, the players, who pick half the roster (and admittedly have the very best players taken away by the fan vote), continue to reward short-term performance over long-term. It makes for an All-Star Game populated not by "rising stars" but by players going nova for three months.