Here’s a somewhat more systematic approach to All-Star game selections and mis-selections than my last piece took, with the caveat that I’m not by nature a very systematic analyst, certainly not as compared to Bill James, or most of my audience, for that matter. My other caveat would be that I don’t think there is a right way to pick All-Star teams, just several better techniques than the ones we’ve been using: any method advocated here will find detractors a-plenty, because everyone has his own criteria in deciding who is (and is not) an All-Star.
It’s even an open question as to whether we should be choosing "All-Star players," or "players who are having an All-Star season" (or "half-season"), as well as an open question regarding such factors as "Every team must have a representative." Must they? Some fans like that concept—I don’t. I find it patronizing to the weaker teams, who I think are served better ultimately by the motivation inherent in "Gosh, we haven’t had an All-Star in six years—ya think we oughta DO something about that?" Most of the "bad" choices quoted or linked to below can be explained by that single standard: they were chosen to fulfill the requirement that every team have a representative. But the only over-arching truism I’m spouting here is: "We can choose better All-Star teams," and not everyone agrees with even that statement. I, however, am always going to express my dissatisfaction with almost any process, and I’m going to express a lot of dissatisfaction with a process as flawed as this one is.
If you do a quick search on the Internet for "Worst MLB All-Stars," as I just did, you’re going to find that quite a few people have expressed opinions on the matter. (I stopped searching when I found my latest BJOL column at the bottom of page 2 of my search—"my own work" is my definition of "scraping the bottom of the barrel.") I’m going to present a selection of what these various opiners have come up with, and comment on a few links. Mostly they repeat each other, and I’ve edited out the repetitions. They also use very different standards: one goes back to the first All-Star game in 1933. Some set far more recent cut-offs. "Ten years ago" is my own cut-off date in my little list that ends this column of less-than-stellar players who made some recent All-Star squads.
In commenting on these lists, I’ve also imposed my own categorical judgments as to bogus and legitimate All-Stars. Cal Ripken’s name, for example, comes up on a few lists, because he made one All-Star roster long after passing his prime, when he wasn’t having a particularly good season by his standards. Another list included Willie Mays (in his last year)-- Reggie Jackson, Luis Aparicio and other HoFers crop up here and there. I agree that Ripken and Mays appeared on All-Star rosters well past their prime, but so what? I won’t waste space here arguing against the inclusion of elderly players who’ve amassed impressive career numbers and the adoration of a generation of fans. Willie Mays earned his lifetime All-Star status early on in his career—if he turns up on next season’s All-Star team, I’m not going to put up a strong argument. So I didn’t get into the websites that nominated these guys as bogus All-Stars.
Also omitted (mostly) are players who weren’t having good first halves, but who were coming off a strong previous year. It’s legitimate to adopt a standard of the quality of the entire preceding season—that is, of the current first half combined with the last half of the last season. The real question is how far back do you want to go? To me, I want my All-Stars to have established some sort of reliable track record for stardom that extends well beyond the first part of the current season, and preferably to bring into this season a solid baseline of star-quality play. A lot of the players whom I have included below lack that well-established record of quality, and many of them had careers following their All-Star selection that make you question why, exactly, they found themselves on an All-Star team at all. Besides players chosen to fulfill the "every team must have a rep" requirement, my main complaint concerns those players chosen on the basis of a hot start alone amid the absence of All-Star quality performance in previous seasons.
So several of my choices are (like Don Leppert, a name that will not appear again in this article) players who got off to a hot start, in the middle of otherwise unexceptional careers, and maintained decent numbers for almost precisely the period in which All-Star teams were being chosen that year (usually through the middle of June), after which their career returned to their previously established levels of mediocrity. An extreme example of this phenomenon would be someone like Bryan LaHair, who in his first 28 games of the 2012 season, through May 9th, batted .384 with 8 HR and 18 RBI in 86 at-bats. Pretty impressive. In his next 46 games, from May 10th through the All-Star game, LaHair returned to planet Earth, batting .228 with 6 HRs and 12 RBI in 145 at-bats, but the damage had already been done so LaHair found himself on the All-Star team. In the remainder of the 2012 season, LaHair’s slash numbers crashed (.202/ 2/ 10 in 109 at-bats) and he never (well, not so far, anyway) played another major league game. I don’t think this is what we mean by "an All-Star player," a guy who hits uncharacteristically well for six weeks.
If you’re wondering, no, LaHair had not put up impressive stats before 2012 (he brought an OPS+ of 98 into the season in under 200 at-bats) so there was no powerful reason to think his early 2012 stats were a demonstration of great ability. I bring up this example because it illustrates my problem with All-Star selection in a nutshell: any system that makes it even possible to qualify as an All-Star solely on the basis of 28 good games fulfills my definition of "flawed." Honestly, I don’t even remember Bryan LaHair’s career at all (my first thought on seeing his name on the roster was "Is this a joke? LaHair? As in LaCombe or LaBrush?" and then I looked up his career). Most of the other All-Star selections below are more legitimate than LaHair, but I was only able to recall most of them vaguely. I’m sure someone can come along to tell me LaHair’s virtues that I missed, or explain why he sank from MLB after 2012 for non-baseball-related reasons. If I’m not being LaFair to LaHair, please do tell me why. Or maybe you think that 28 games (in 6 of which he went hitless) does qualify someone to play in the All-Star game. That’s cool. I don’t.
Were the weaker players listed below chosen because their seasons got off to a hot start? Or because fate intervened and, bad as their numbers look, every other player competing for the All-Star team that year had even worse numbers? Or every legitimate contender was injured, maybe? Perhaps some of them were chosen by managers who felt warmly for whatever reasons towards them? Or maybe they were chosen by fans voting in a frenzy of passionate fanship, disregarding entirely the actual quality of play? Or because it was their turn to make an All-Star team? Doesn’t really matter to me: I’d prefer some system that established a baseline of past performance, ruling out the fluke selections, and that eliminated the personal biases of managers, and that disregarded the votes of fans from one rabid geographic location, and attempted to be more rational about the process than we’ve mostly been so far.
I thought I might try simply selecting the best 25 players in past leagues on the basis of WAR or some such objective standard, just to compare such rosters to the historical All-Star rosters, but realized that in addition to being a tedious process, there was no way to arrive at a fair cutoff date. Even if I wanted to compute each contender’s WAR as of that half-season, how many games would constitute a half-season? And if I did that, somehow, shouldn’t I include at least the previous season’s WAR from the All-Star game on? And if I did that, why not include the entire previous year’s WAR? Or maybe half of the previous year’s WAR? Or maybe, in Bill’s fashion, the entire WAR of the current season (up to some arbitrary date), plus half of the previous year’s WAR, and one-quarter of the season’s WAR before that? But if I include the past 2 and ½ seasons, wouldn’t it then be impossible for any rookie ever to make an All-Star team? Whatever system I devised for using WAR, or Win Shares, would have its own flaws, and would likely lead me to no better a conclusion than I can draw right now: the rosters would be different with any "objective" system, but it would probably reflect genuine stardom better than the subjective All-Star selection process we continue to use.
http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/lists/Worst-MLB-All-Star-picks-in-history#photo-title=&photo=
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This is a Fox sports slideshow of poor All-Star selections from the past decade or three, featuring the aforementioned Cal Ripken, who gets a pass from me, and this cast of genuinely weak selections:
Roger Pavlik, p, 1996
Lance Carter, p, 2003
Scott Cooper, 3b, 1993, 1994
Mike Williams, p, 2003
Cesar Itzturis, ss 2005
Mark Redman, p, 2006
Mark Loretta, 2b, 2006
Sandy Alomar, c, 1991
A pretty fair list of players widely considered to be non-All-Star caliber. "Loretta, get back to where you once belonged" sums it up for me.
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http://www.realclearsports.com/lists/top_10_mlb_allstars/steve_rogers.html?state=stop
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The best ("worst") new names by this slideshow list are probably
Steve Rogers, p, 1974
Freddie Patek, ss, 1972
Alfredo Griffen, ss, 1984
This list goes back a little further, but stops in the early 1970s, leaving open the issue of poor All-Star choices from the inception, 1933, through the next four decades.
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http://www.sportingnews.com/list/4647514-worst-all-stars-baseball-history-voting-royals-ballot-stuffing-omar-infante/slide/332441a>
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This somewhat buggy, unnavigable, click-bait-laden slideshow from the Sporting News also covers the past 40 years, and it does suggest better alternatives to the players named. Problem is, the alternatives suggested often have little better credentials than the players actually named to the All-Star team. Many of these are arguable, but if the best case you can offer is merely arguable, I don’t really see the point. One interesting case is Freddie Patek, whom they name for his 1978 selection, claiming (contra the realclear list above) that he was a legit selection in 1972 but a poor one in 1978. Ken Reitz’s 1980 starting selection is justifiably questioned, as his middle-of-the-pack career numbers are about the same as his 1980 numbers—more deserving contemporary 3b-men suggested here (to replace an injured Mike Schmidt) are Ray Knight, Ron Cey, Darrell Evans, and Bob Horner. Hard to argue that Reitz was a better 3b-man on the best day of his life than some of those guys. Kosuke Fukudome in 2008 got off to a decent start, but Adam Dunn (40 HRs in 2008) and Carlos Beltran missed the cut that year, so Fukudome may be hard to justify. Richie Zisk’s second All-Star appearance in 1978 is questioned, with Otis, Bonds, and Singleton missing the team that year.
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http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=list/worstallstars
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This list, and the next one, interest me because they do extend back to 1933, dealing with the decades when we have only the record books, not our eyes, to tell us who was legitimate and who was not. There are some war-time picks here (Frankie Zak, 1944, and Eddie Smith, 1944, and no, I’m not just making up those names), and a few mediocrities from the 1950s and 1960s whom I don’t ordinarily think of when I think "All-Star" quality players (Billy Hunter, 1953; Dave Stenhouse, 1962; Chris Cannizzaro, 1969; and Ellie Rodriguez, 1969). Mostly those picks played for expansion teams, some in their first year of existence, which is both a good argument for not awarding a rep for every single team and simply for choosing better players from those lousy teams. Nate Colbert and Ollie Brown were having productive years, while Cannizzaro blocked such catchers as Manny Sanguillan and Jerry Grote, both having good years, from the squad. In more modern times, ESPN chooses such non-stars as Tyler Green and Heathcliff Slocumb (both Phillies in 1995), Steve Swisher (Cubs, 1976) and Billy Grabarkewitz, (Dodgers, 1970), all hard to make much of a case for.
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http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1241568-40-most-undeserving-mlb-all-stars-of-all-time/page/2
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This list goes back to the 1930s, and usually suggests better alternative choices. New names to our list include:
1933: Woody English
1934: Jack Russell
1940: Billy Jurges
1946: Eddie Miller
1948: Clyde McCullough
1950: Ray Scarborough
1960: Jim Coates
1960: Dick Stigman
1961: Mike Fornieles
1981: Dick Ruthven
1999: Ron Coomer
How did Ron Coomer make the 1999 All-Star team, you ask? Even if you don’t, you could probably guess: he got hot for the season’s first month, batting .365 through May 16th. Outside of that first month, Coomer compiled a career .730 OPS (OPS+ of 87 including his hot start in 1999) as a first-baseman in the steroid era. Without checking, I suspect that scenario, or something very much like it, applies to most of these picks.
The earlier names are completely unfamiliar to me, so I’m reliant on bleacherreports.com’s judgment. (I was vaguely familiar with Jack Russell, but as a terrier, not a pitcher.) I suspect we can look at Woody English’s competition in 1933 and find a HoFer or two having a good year. Let’s try: hmmm, first place, there were 18 men to a squad way back when. Hardly seems comparable to current teams that have 38 or so men per All-Star team, not counting injured players. In 1933 the NL squad had apparently decided to dispense with the need for a backup SS or 1B-man altogether. But back to NL 3b-men in 1933—while they didn’t need a backup SS or 1B-man, they seem to have needed TWO backup 3b-men. Dunno how they arrived at that formula, but it certainly worked for Woody English. He could be the third-best thirdbaseman in an eight-team league and still make the All-Star Game. Sweet! Actually, English got into that year’s game as a backup shortstop, his main position in previous seasons, playing short in the 1933 All-Star Game for two innings (or one fewer than he played in the regular season for the 1933 Cubs). As to HoFers in the league who might have displaced English as a backup shortstop, they were mostly very young (Arky Vaughan’s second season as a starting shortstop) or very old (Rabbit Maranville’s last). OTOH, Vaughan and Maranville both got MVP votes in 1933, which English did not.
Ray Scarborough’s 1950 selection is odd, if only because Scarborough was traded on Memorial Day, totaling a .500 W-L record and a 3.70 ERA for both clubs by the end of June. He ended up with a losing W-L record in 1950 for both the Senators, his old club, and the White Sox, his new club, although he did have a better 1949 season and a downright strong 1948 for the Senators, in neither of which years did he make the All-Star team. Such a pattern, of a player getting selected to an All-Star team when he wasn’t having a particularly good season but when he had had a better but non-All-Star season, is virtuous, I suppose, and common enough. Woody English and Mike Fornieles, from this list alone, are examples of such "make-up" choices. (English’s previous "All-Star" years, of course, had come prior to the first All-Star Game.) I call such choices virtuous because they at least recognize the players’ actual histories rather than just the first few weeks of an anomalous season, but of course the ideal is to choose players who are having both an outstanding current year AND an established history of outstanding play.
Jim Coates’s selection in 1960 is also a strange one—I remember him mostly as a mediocre middle reliever on some very good Stengel/Houk Yankee teams (lifetime ERA+ of only 80), and as a particularly homely fellow (I think Bouton in Ball Four said that he modeled for the skull-and-crossbones on the iodine bottle—Coates’ nickname was "The Mummy.") But to my surprise, Coates was not a reliever on the early 1960 Yanks, but a starter, and a damned good one, or a damned lucky one: Through June, his W-L record in 12 starts was 9-0, which is hard to find fault with, though his ERA is questionable: 3.74 in a league whose ERA that year was 3.87. He did complete 6 starts in the season’s first three months, with two shutouts, both of which would make him a candidate nowadays for leading a league in those categories over two seasons, and which was pretty good even for 1960. But he had a horrible winless July, and lost his starting job after giving up 24 earned runs in 20.2 IP though August 3rd. Aside from getting off to the good start in 1960, and pitching fairly well as a reliever in the previous season, his rookie year, Coates hadn’t really established himself as a dominant AL pitcher. Oddly enough, 1960 was one of the very few years from 1950-1965 that the Yankees’ manager did NOT select the All-Star starting pitching staff, the White Sox having won the previous year’s pennant. His 6th and 8th wins of 1960 were against the Sox, the 8th win coming at around the point that Al Lopez would have made his choices. Notably absent from the AL squad was Jim Bunning, who had a mere 5-4 W-L record through June, but an impressive 2.48 ERA, and whom Bill has often asserted was the best pitcher in the league that year, his losing W-L record notwithstanding. Billy Pierce, also among the missing, was having his characteristically strong season, matching Coates’ first few months in everything but Wins and Losses but with a track record behind him dwarfing Coates’.
The 1960 AL staff is weird, in general. The Indians’ had two 24-year old pitchers who were having good first halves, Jim Perry, a second-year starter, and Jim Stigman, a rookie reliever. Perry had had a good rookie year in 1959, finishing second in the ROTY voting, and was 8-3 with a 3.14 ERA in over 100 IP through June. Stigman had a higher ERA, many fewer IP, and no previous MLB experience, so naturally Stigman got the nod. Their previous and subsequent careers established Jim Perry as one of the top pitchers of his era, and Stigman as an annual nominee for the prestigious "Who’s he, again?" award.
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http://baseball.about.com/od/allstargam1/tp/worstallstars.htm
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This site adds a few new names to the list (Kent Bottenfield 1999, Jose Rosado 1997, 1999, Rolando Arrojo 1998, Junior Spivey 2002) while reiterating several of the other lists of "Who’s he?" All-Stars. Bottenfield is intriguing because he made the team in the middle of a very strong season, after a terrific start (14-3 by the All-Star break) but, again, had had an undistinguished career prior to that half-season, and an undistinguished one after that point, so benefited from a good few months. Apart from that 14-3 start, Bottenfield’s career W-L record was 32-42, playing for eight teams in nine seasons, accumulating exactly a 100 ERA+ over that period. A wiser choice might have been the reigning (and two-time) Cy Young Award winner, Tom Glavine, who got off to a slow start in 1999 (3-7 in the first third of the year) but after that point (and of course for many seasons before that point) pitched exactly like Tom Glavine. Is a 3-7 Glavine an All-Star while a 14-3 Bottenfield is not? This is the Brett-Harrah debate redux.
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http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/131282706/mlb-all-star-game-voting-questionable-selections
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This site has writer Tim Healey IDing some questionable All-Stars, adding such names as Esteban Loaiza (White Sox, 2004) and Matt Capps (Nationals, 2010) to our illustrious list, and remarking on the reasons various players got misselected—his "blame game" lists managers, fans, or players as the culprits, but most of the blame overall goes to the system that insists on each team having one representative, however putrid or suspect his credentials. Kevin Correia? Shawn Chacon? Really?
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I have a few recent additions to add to the above lists, taken from recent seasons: A.J. Pollock, 2015; Marco Scutaro and Domonic Brown, 2013; Evan Meek, 2010; Zack Duke, 2009; and Joe Crede and Dioner Navarro, 2008. Most of these players’ careers, I admit, evaded my scrutiny, and if I was even aware of most of them, it was as an unexceptional player on a team that my team was facing. I don’t remember quaking in my flip-flops when I read in the morning paper that the Mets were facing Zack Duke or the Red Sox were going to have to figure out Evan Meek that night. As a one-time Sox fan and one-time Mets fan (I’ve since abandoned rooting altogether, but that’s a subject for another column), I just couldn’t praise Marco Scutaro enough—but an All-Star? Please. In his dreams, maybe. At age 37, he’d established himself firmly as a scrappy utility infielder, playing second, short and third competently with an only slightly below average bat. So how does he find himself on the All-Star team that year? Did Chase Utley die, and I missed that story, or something? Beats me.
I know that the Meek shall inherit and all that, and that Evan Meek had a crazy start to his 2010 season (an under-one ERA until late June) but the guy had an overall ERA of 3.63 in 196 IP, so do you think it’s the crazy start that’s maybe the anomaly? That’s 196 IP in Meek’s entire career, btw. Nolan Ryan pitched that many before lunch.
Ryan pitched in the Major Leagues, incidentally, in nineteen seasons in which he did NOT make the All-Star team. I think I could find a few of those 19 seasons, long after he’d established his bona fides as a Star, where some bozo made the All-Star team in his place, but I’ll just let that figure sink in for a bit—nineteen years of not making the All-Star team. Gotta be some kind of record, right?
These are some of the most undeserving players, historically, to be chosen for the Mid-season Classic. I will post (very soon) my listing of the best players who never were chosen for an All-Star roster, and the years that I think they most deserved being chosen, but first I want to hear from anyone who’d care to defend these choices, or to defend the selection process used to make these choices. In the next (and final, you’ll be glad to know) installment in this series, I propose a slightly more rational selection process that compels the choosers to at least account for candidates’ previous careers, and not to choose so much on the basis of that season’s first few weeks.