Cardinals fans are furious, but it is the All-Star game, not the All-Stat game

Oh, the outrage!

The MLB All-Star game is a joke. This is just ridiculous. How dare the voters not want my favorite players to start! Fans say this every year. It was said even during the very first All-Star game ever played. 

First, everyone needs to take a breath and understand just what the All-Star game is. It is right there in its name. It is the All-“STAR” game and not the All-“STATS” game. 

The very first Major League Baseball All-Star Game took place on July 6, 1933, at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Chicago’s mayor, Ed Kelly, had approached Arch Ward, the sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, to help put together a massive, marquee sporting event to tie into the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Ward was the one who established the precedent that the game belonged to the fans. He convinced MLB to let the public vote for the starting lineup. It was to be hosted by the Chicago White Sox. 

St. Louis fans felt outraged as soon as MLB announced that very first team. Sound familiar? One of the best pitchers that year was the Cardinals’ Dizzy Dean. That year, he was on his way to 199 strikeouts. The second best was Carl Hubbell with 156. Hubbell made the team; Dean did not. 

Other teams had similar complaints. By 1933, Babe Ruth was 38 years old and clearly in decline. The fans didn’t care. They voted him in. Ruth was the biggest star, and they wanted to see him. Other players definitely had better seasons, but that was not what this game was about. It was about seeing STARS. 

The Cardinals just lack the star power necessary to send players to the All-Star Game

One problem Cardinals fans have is not realizing that the team has no stars. Not really. Not yet. Even one of our best players, Alec Burleson, isn’t a national star. Freddie Freeman is a star and probably a future Hall of Famer. Their stats are very similar this year, but Freeman has a WAR of 2.4 to Burleson’s 1.8 WAR. If you ask most fans to name a first baseman quickly, most will say Freeman before they even think about Burleson. Jordan Walker is putting up the best numbers of his career, but until this year, no one outside of St. Louis knew who he was. St. Louis fans express outrage, but Chicago presents an even stronger case with Pete Crow-Armstrong. All he is doing is leading the league with a 4.8 WAR (Walker has 2.1 WAR), and he isn’t making the starting lineup either. 

Byron Buxton is having a much better year than Mike Trout, but I still want to see Trout play. 

The other factor is that there are so many more fans watching Freeman play every night. The LA metro area has a population of 12.8 million, Philadelphia is 6.3 million, and St. Louis is 2.8 million. 

Everyone gets so upset about Philadelphia and LA having a monopoly on All-Stars, but mostly, the players they acquire are All-Stars before joining the team. The Cardinals could do that too, and they have. Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado are just two examples. 

Once this team makes the playoffs and goes on a long postseason run, MLB fans will see how good our players are. Most fans will not go to FanGraphs to decide who to vote for.

As true baseball fans, not just Cardinals fans, we should enjoy seeing the STARS. 

In the first game, with everyone complaining about Ruth making the team, all he did was, at 38 years old I must say, steal the show. He hit the first home run in All-Star history to lift the American League to a 4-2 victory. How would that be for a memory? 

Dizzy Dean also came out just fine after his snub. Three weeks after that All-Star game, the other team from that host city, the Chicago Cubs, came to St. Louis. Dean broke the strikeout record that day by fanning 17 Cubs. In true Ohtani style, he also went three for four with two doubles and two RBI. 

Dizzy Dean made the All-Star team the following year. 

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