Who should be starting for the NL All-Star Team? OR How Michael Bourn got jipped.

The All-Star game frustrates me more than almost anything else in baseball.  The Mid-Summer Classic used to be a fun exhibition where you could see the biggest names in the game play against each other.  Before Interleague play, the American League played the National League twice a year.  The All-Star Game and the World Series.  When the game was only an exhibition game, there was nothing wrong with fans voting for the teams, but now that the game determines home-field advantage, the fans need to be taken out of the process.

Using the stat Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) is a pretty darn good way to figure out how good a player really is.  I used this stat to figure out which players should be on the All-Star team by picking the player with the best WARP at their position and the top three Outfielders since All-Star voting does not distinguish between outfield positions.

A good place to read more about WARP is at FanGraphs here.

Since this is a Braves blog, I will pick the "Should Have Been" National League All-Star team now and will make another post in a couple of days with the real American League All-Star team.

Without further ado, here is my Should Have Been National League All-Star team contrasted with the team that fans selected.

How much better is the "Should Have Been" team? If you add up the WARP for each of these teams, the Should Have Been team has a total WARP of 32.8 and the actual team has a WARP of 20.0.  This means that these players combined would be worth almost 13 more wins to a team than if the team had the players selected by fans. Clearly San Francisco fans did a really good job voting since they got three Giants onto the All-Star team when no Giants are on the Should Have Been team.

What the Fans got right: Joey Votto.  As you can see in the table above, Joey Votto is the only All-Star that the fans got right.  This may be because he has the greatest WARP spread between him and the next best player at his position.  Another possible reason is that Cincinnati fans are great and did a great job getting him voted onto the team. 

Who was jipped by the All-Star process? There are two players who should have been starters because they have the best WARP at their respective positions.  Aaron Hill did not make the National League team at all.  While he has the lowest WARP of all the players who should have been selected to the NL starters, he has the highest WARP of any NL second basemen.  Second base seems to be one of the least appreciated position because Brandon Phillips has a WARP of 2.1 which is the same as that of Dan Uggla who is the NL starter and Phillips also got the snub.

We will end this Braves blog post by talking about the Brave who is by far the player jipped the most in the All-Star Game process.  Michael Bourn was passed over twice by baseball fans in the first round voting and also in the last roster spot voting.  Bourn has the highest WARP of any outfielder in the NL and the third highest WARP in the NL behind Joey Votto and David Wright, which just goes to show Bourn played the first half of the season at an MVP-like level.  I know Bryce Harper moves the needle more than Michael Bourn, but the All-Star game should be about celebrating the players having the best season.  Thankfully, Bourn has been added to the team to replace Ian Desmond.  This is better than Bourn not being recognized at all, but he should have been selected from day one and not as an after thought.  Either the All-Star game needs to go back to an exhibition, or the selection process should be taken away from the fans.  It is pretty disappointing to think that a game designed to celebrate the best players in baseball would have been without one of the game's elite players - all because of a broken process.