2008 All Star Game

In honor of the upcoming all-star game (it's at Yankee Stadium, if you hadn't heard), and the various crimes against baseball humanity inherent to the selection process, for my inaugural post I'll be selecting my very own all-star roster. How novel!

(For the record, I intend this blog to be Mets-centric eventually, but watching these games lately has been too much like HALO jumping for me to comment rationally on them.)

So, first I'll have to establish my personal criteria for selection.

First off, and many (read: most) people will disagree with me, I think the all-star game should reward the players that have had the best season so far. I understand that this insures that some wacky 3 month wonders will make the team every year, but if you're going to have your selection process end in the middle of the season you should expect this. There are a slew of end-of-the-year awards handed out after the season to reward players who have performed the best over 162 games and the best players over the course of several years will probably be honored by the Hall of Fame. It's very difficult to weigh a player's contribution over a few seasons versus another's contribution to the current year, so to avoid nebulous decisions over whether or not a player is a bigger "star" than another, I'll stick to a merit-based first half performance ranking.

Next, to standardize the rosters, I'll be taking two players from every field position except left field. The way I figure it, any right or center fielder could play left if they needed to; so I'll try to avoid penalizing a player for having too much defensive value to play left by taking, as my left fielders, the two best remaining outfielders, wherever they may play. The two DH selections will simply be the two best remaining hitters, regardless of position. As for the pitchers, I see no reason to select 12 for a single game (especially one featuring a DH). I'll be picking the five best starters and the two best relievers (not necessarily closers). So each roster will have:

2 Catchers
2 First basemen
2 Second basemen
2 Third basemen
2 Shortstops
2 Center fielders
2 Right fielders
2 Outfielders
2 Designated hitters
5 Starting pitchers
2 Relief pitchers

I'll be using mostly Baseball Prospectus' WARP3 and The Hardball Times' Win Shares to evaluate these players, with consideration given to BP's VORP and EQA and Baseball Reference's OPS+ for the hitters and VORP (again), and BR's ERA+ for the pitchers.

Finally, none of this every team gets an all-star crap. My team is merit-based only.

I'm excited. This should be fun and educational. Yippee!