Let's Go Yankstons
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by user Friskysman
If you follow baseball, you are probably aware of the ongoing crisis in which it is quite possible that seven of the eight starters on the American League All Star team could be from either the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. This is not necessarily because those teams have good players, but has more to do with an East Coast-centric media and their influence on the rest of the country.
This situation has convinced me that fans should no longer have a say in the All Star rosters. Year after year we see undeserving players get voted in on name and reputation alone, and it is media outlets like ESPN that shove the East Coast names down our throats. You know you have a problem when every single meaningless game of a Yankees/Sox series in May is on national television. Meanwhile, you have to be the next Babe Ruth if you want to get any media recognition playing for a team outside of Boston or New York.
All this being said, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what the American League All Star team would look like if it were chosen based on my method. What is my method, you ask? I say, forget votes. Just pick the best players. Thankfully, there are these things called “statistics” that allow us to measure a player’s performance throughout the season. I think they could probably be used in a way in which we could determine who the best players are and put them on the All Star team. It’s a stretch, I know, but I went ahead and tested it out and it seems to work.
Now, there are all sorts of stats we could use to do this, but I took the simplest method and just ranked players in the most popular statistical categories. This is a nice compromise in that, while the selection process is no longer a popularity contest, we can still use the stats most point to in the popularity contest. Therefore, I ranked players in the categories of runs scored, runs batted in, homeruns, batting average, on-base plus slugging, and I gave a smaller bonus for stolen base leaders. Based on that, here is your roster for the 2006 American League All Stars:
Catcher: Joe Mauer, backup: Victor Martinez
First Base: Jim Thome, backup: Travis Hafner
Second Base: Jose Lopez, backup: Tadahito Iguchi
Third Base: Alex Rodriguez, backup: Troy Glaus
Short Stop: Miguel Tejada, backup: Derek Jeter
Outfield: Jermaine Dye, backup: Grady Sizemore
Outfield: Vernon Wells, backup: Manny Ramirez
Outfield: Ichiro Suzuki, backup: Nick Swisher
So there you have it. One Yankee starter and two Yankee/Boston backups. That seems about right to me. No, not all of the biggest names are there, but that’s still a great team and would probably do a service to MLB by exposing the world to more than just the Yankees and Red Sox. I would watch an All Star game with that team. As it stands right now, I will probably rent a movie.
Date
Fri 06/23/06, 5:18 am EST
