DENVER, CO – July at the ballpark. There is no better time to go. In addition to the beer hot dogs and popcorn, it is Major League Baseball All-Star Game voting time. I am one of the [wax poetic] voters that refuses to vote online. I love the weird joy of the pushpin voting brochure. From the writing in relief pitchers to picking off the hanging chads to make sure the vote is clear, there is nothing better than the paper MLB All-Star ballot. Sadly not all players are All-Stars or even core performers. Some players are downright dreadful. How come no one asks the fans who should get fired? Why is there a No-Star ballot to go in tandem with the All-Star ballot? I don’t know but I aim to change this going forward. Welcome to year one of the official Meet The Matts No-Star Team starting lineup.
LF
Jorge Soler: The Marlins need to sell the team to the cartel. The cartel wouldn’t tolerate paying a guy like Jorge 12 million a year to hit the Mendoza Line and 20 bombs. The cartel knows that stat lines like that are bad for baseball.
CF
Adam Duvall: A .206 B.A. and 94 Strikeouts in 294 Plate Appearances will land you on this team – or perhaps a bus back to the minors.
RF
Juan Soto: Juan Soto is the best player on this list with the brightest future on this list. He is also proof that arbitration works. Juan is getting paid 17 mil on a one-year deal. He signed this deal during his first year of arbitration eligibility. The Nats have been rewarded by not negotiating Soto into a long term deal. After starting his career with MVP type numbers of his first four seasons, Juan is currently batting .231 and slugging .450. Good luck at the table next year Juan!
1B
Joey Votto: How did Votto make this list? What happened to him? Yeah, he is old and his career has been a wasted futile exercise in a city where the prison is across the street from the casino (both are downtown) but… He is one of the best players of the past 15 years. Currently he is being paid 25 million to hit .210
2B
Tony Kemp: While he’s hitting a full 4 percentage points higher than Adam Duvall, .210 isn’t what JG Clancy & the Oakland A’s expected. But at least he has 2 homers in 294 Plate Appearances (same as Duvall!)
SS
Willy Adames: Somewhere, someplace, David “Sky King” Kingman is smiling. Adames has 16 homers and 45 RBIs. That’s good. He’s only hitting .206, though. That’s bad. No-Star Team bad. When the Rays trade you for two pitchers (for J.P. Feyereisen and Drew Rasmussen) it usually means they are getting the better deal. In this case, they did.
3B
Max Muncy: .167 The lowest average of any player with enough plate appearances to qualify for league standings. Max is the baseball version of Elmer Fudd. He’s carrying a bat to the plate every time but he never manages to kill anything.
C
Elias Diaz: The dish man for the No-Stars has earned the starting nod with a .211 BA and an impressive league leading 7 errors so far this season. Equally impressive is that his OBP is .264. Somehow the other team was afraid of Elias enough to walk him 14 times this season. In other words 20% of the time he gets on base it was the other teams failure and not Elias’s success.
P
Madison Bumgarner: 23 million dollars. That is how much is cost a season for a 4-8 start with a 3.85 ERA and a 1.37 whip. At this pace Madbum is going to get paid nearly 3 million per win he gets this season. Somewhere in wine country there is a pasture that Madison needs to be sent to.
Feel free to leave your All-Star/No-Star selections below and come back tomorrow for a guy that will never go willingly off into the pasture, Aristotle “Mugsy” Sakellaridis.
