MLB All-Star Game Selections

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July holiday weekend.

Over the weekend, the Major League Baseball
All-Star teams were announced. This year, the selection of the All-Stars was probably more scrutinized then most years because of the question surrounding whether rookie phenom Stephen Strasburg should make the All-Star team despite having only made six starts before the rosters came out on July 3rd. Here are the rosters, of which Strasburg was left out of the National League team. While some believe that MLB should have displayed its biggest phenom to a national audience, Philles manager Charlie Manuel (the manager of the NL All-Star team) justified his decision not to include Strasburg. Manuel did the right thing, I believe. There is simply too much great pitching in the National League, to leave out a veteran who has pitched 3 times as much as Strasburg. While there is still the possibility that Strasburg can be selected as an injury replacement, I hope more deserving pitchers get selected.

This leads me to my other thoughts about the selection of the MLB All-Stars:

1.Even though the All-Star rosters have increased to 34, there are still many deserving players left out...

2. such as Cincinati's Joey Votto. Votto is a candidate for the Final Man on the NL Roster and you can vote for him here. He is leading the National League in OBP (On base % plus slugging %), and is easily the biggest snub of the all-star picks. So far he is leading the Final Man competition. I hope he gets it, he deserves it...

3. as does Jered Weaver of the Angels, who is leading the American League in strikeouts, but did not get selected to the dismay of teammates and his manager Mike Scioscia. I think it is weird that the Angels, who are hosting the All-Star Game only have one representative. Teams who are hosting the All-Star Game should have mulitiple representatives if they are deserving such as Weaver...

4. but naturally, every team has to have one representative, which I think is the right thing to do as long as players on bad teams have had seasons worthy of All-Star consideration. For the most part, the players who are their teams' sole representatives were selected by their peers to the All-Star teams and were good enough to be considered an All-Star.

5. The most baffling pick of the All-Star teams was Atlanta's Omar Infante, a pretty good utility player but certainly not an All-Star. He's a decent player, but doesn't even have enough at bats to qualify as a statistical leader. Futher reason to vote for Joey Votto.