St. Louis Cardinals: Vote for Jack Flaherty for the All-MLB team

In the first year of the MLB’s All-MLB team, Jack Flaherty is the only St. Louis Cardinals player on the ballot. Let’s get Flaherty in! Go Vote!

So it seems the MLB has decided to add another award for the awards season, and this St. Louis Cardinals fan missed the announcement. I guess it happened either on Monday or over the weekend, but the MLB now is going to have a first and second All-MLB team.

I’ve never cared too much about the awards that players get after the season as you’re either really happy or upset and getting too riled up about something that more or less amounts to a trophy isn’t a huge deal.

That being said, the ballot for this year’s All-MLB team has just one Cardinal, Jack Flaherty. This is an absolute shame for one player.

Nobody is going to say that all of the Cardinals’ position players should be on the ballot, but for one, at least Kolten Wong should be on there at second base. The six candidates they have for second base are Max Muncy, Ozzie Albies, Whit Merrifield, Jonathan Villar, DJ LeMahieu, and Jose Altuve.

This is a great crop of players, but by bWAR, Wong was better than Merrifield and Villar. Wong won the Gold Glove at second base in the NL, and while those two were slightly more valuable offensively, Wong’s overall value was almost a full bWAR point ahead of them.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that any of the Cardinals’ other six starting fielders or pitchers deserve a spot on this ballot, but Wong certainly does.

Either way, Flaherty earned his spot after pitching the best second half in almost the history of baseball and finishing fourth in Cy Young voting, so we should all vote for him.

Flaherty is one of 19 starting pitchers on the ballot and only five are going to make it onto the first team, but he has as good a chance as any to make one of the teams.

The voting goes until December 3rd and the teams will be announced at the Winter Meetings. Fans can only vote once per 24 hours.

This may be a vanity award or just something to keep the MLB buzzing while the hot stove stays cold, but either way, vote for Jack Flaherty and hopefully he can make it onto one of the teams. We all know he deserves it.