The Los Angeles Dodgers have the best record in Major League Baseball at 52–30, 22 games over .500 and with a comfortable seven-and-a-half-game lead in the National League West. When the National League All-Star team was announced yesterday, three Dodgers made the squad. The New York Mets are a season-low three games under .500 at 39–42, in a tie for third place and four games behind the Phillies. Four Mets made the All-Star squad.
As always come All-Star selection time, it’s good to be in New York. Our fine city had a total of seven Yankees and Mets named to next Tuesday’s All-Star Game in St. Louis: Mark Teixeira, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, David Wright, Carlos Beltran, Francisco Rodriguez, and Johan Santana. That’s right: The Mets, with a record nine games worse than the Yankees, have one more All-Star.
Of course, Beltran, whom the fans voted in as a starter, won’t be playing, so the Mets will only have three players in the game. But it’s a testament to just how top-heavy the Mets are — and how questionable a job Omar Minaya has done filling out the roster 1-to-25 — that a team that looks as awful as the Mets do right now could end up with more All-Stars than any team in baseball outside of Boston.
The Yankees received some eleventh-hour good news on the All-Star front, with Teixeira overtaking Red Sox first baseman Kevin Youkilis to make the starting nine. (Youkilis was named as a reserve, as Teixeira would have surely been had he finished second.) Some peculiar voting abnormalities there: Teixeira’s vote total almost doubled in the final three days of voting, allowing him to pull into the lead. In case you were wondering, this will be the first time Alex Rodriguez has not made an All-Star team since 1999, and only the second time since 1996. We can’t imagine why this year, of all years, was the one in which he missed it.
