Who should be starting for the AL All-Star team? OR AL fans are twice as smart as NL fans

The 2012 All-Star game will be starting in just a few moments, so I thought I would put up my second blog post about which players should have been selected by the fans to start for the American League All-Star team.

If you would like to see how I made up my team, check out my blog post on who should have been selected by fans for the NL team here.

Here is my "Should Have Been" AL team contrasted with the team selected by the fans.

If you compare the two lists, you see that the fans only selected two players that should be on the team, Robinson Cano and Josh Hamilton.

Robinson Cano is a very strong player and he has the Win Above Replacement Player (WARP) of any second basemen.  Cano also has the second highest WARP of all American League players, exceeded by only Mike Trout.  Cano is a big name player from a big name market, but he is truly deserving of being picked by the fans, unlike his Yankee team mates Curtis Granderson and Derek Jeter.  I can hear the Yankee fans getting rile up at the suggestion that Jeter should not have been selected by the fans.

Another fan favorite, Josh Hamilton, is also deserving of his selection by the fans to the AL All-Star team.  Despite his own personal struggles, Hamilton continues to put up huge numbers, and fans love the idea of a redemption story.  While Hamilton is having a great year, he should not have been the number 1 vote getter in the OF for fans.  That distinction belongs to Mike Trout who is having a stellar year and has WARP of 4.8 as a rookie.  Like Cano, Hamilton is more deserving of the fan selection than his Ranger team mate, Mike Napoli. Napoli has a paltry 0.9 WARP, and his selection baffles me since last I checked the best AL catcher, Joe Mauer, is a big star in his own right.

So the fans got two of the picks right for the AL All-Star team which is twice as many as the one that they got right on the NL team.  Hopefully, fans will get smarter before next year's All-Star selection.  But I doubt it.