MLB: AL Sabermetric All-Stars
By Jim Turvey
The MLB All-Star Game is still nearly two months out, but All-Star voting has been open since the start of May, and as a result, baseball fans can’t afford to be uninformed when it comes to filling out a ballot any longer.
The MLB.com ballot gives you some of the classic baseball stats (BA/HR/RBI/SB) when choosing which players to vote for, but we all know there is far more to a player than those numbers suggest. We have seemingly unlimited ways to compare players now, so let’s use some of those to decide who has truly been the most deserving based on their work in 2017.
Today we will look at the American League, stripping out the value of being a big name (although there are plenty of big names in the slides upcoming) and going strictly by the numbers. If the numbers are too close, maybe we can go to a storyline tiebreaker, but these will hopefully rely on cold hard statistics. If that’s not your style, that’s all right, there are plenty of other MLB All-Star articles in the pond.
A few quick things. We are going by FanGraphs’ positional statistics, so players can qualify for a position even if it isn’t their main spot. The MLB All-Star ballot isn’t that flexible, but it doesn’t mean we have to be locked into the same Draconian positional rigidity. Just look at what the NBA is doing with their All-NBA teams. It’s only a matter of time before all the shifting in the field and the multi-positional players make the MLB All-Star ballot less rigid than it is today.
With that in mind, we’ll go one position per slide, leading off with the backstops of the AL.