All-Star voting is silly, but Alex Verdugo’s fan-vote snub is an indictment of the Red Sox
Verdugo, the Red Sox' best player by a reasonably comfortable margin this season, didn't even sniff the fan vote.
COMMENTARY
We’re going to get a little arcane today, because the Red Sox have done nothing to force us to look too close. Two wins, two losses. Nine runs, 10 runs, then opportunities wasted and no runs. Team goes up, team goes down. Playoff odds go up, playoff odds go down.
The long view is better, as Alex Speier pointed out in the Globe specifically about the starting pitching. The short view is, largely by necessity, Justin Garza and Brandon Walter made their major-league debuts on Thursday to fill the hole left by Tanner Houck. (Which will need more filling given Houck is getting a plate in his face.)
Walter went 6⅔ innings to reset the bullpen. David Hamilton’s single was one of just three for the Sox in the game. It could’ve been worse. It also could’ve been something, which the whole series wasn’t after Wednesday was all outs on the bases and chances with runners on uncashed.
That All-Star starter voting progressed without the owners of baseball’s 16th-best record is no headline news. Even if this will be the first year without a Red Sox starter since 2019. Even if the degree to which they won’t is profound — Rafael Devers was fourth in voting among third basemen more on reputation than production, and Masataka Yoshida was eighth among outfielders, two spots from the second stage of voting.
Alex Verdugo? By most metrics the Red Sox; best player by a reasonably comfortable margin this season? Major League Baseball released outfielder vote totals 20 deep at three points in the voting.
Verdugo was never on the board.
I just can’t get over that.
I’ve been watching this long enough to know screaming about “deserving” with the All-Star Game is a fool’s errand. When baseball attached World Series home field to the game, you could maybe make a case about it — which I did, heartily.
Thankfully, I now only complain about important things, like every time the Carolina Hurricanes wear Hartford Whalers colors. (Don’t get me started.) But Verdugo place in all this, or more specifically his lack of one, confirms what we all knew and yet is something that should be repeated for those in the back.
And in the Jersey Street offices.
By Fangraphs’ WAR, Verdugo (away from the team on bereavement leave likely until next week) has been the third- or fourth-best outfielder in the American League. Baseball Reference ties him for second with Tampa’s Randy Arozarena, just behind Luis Robert Jr. — likely the best White Sox you’ll see at Guaranteed Rate Field this weekend.
Verdugo leads American League outfielders in hits and doubles. He’s second in runs to Texas’s Adolis García. Three qualified AL outfielders have .300 averages at the moment: Baltimore’s Austin Hays, Yoshida, and Verdugo. He’s fifth in OPS and has been excellent in the difficult Fenway right field, not to mention as dynamic a personality as the team has at the moment.
He’s embraced playing here. He’s embraced being challenged by Alex Cora. He ticks just about every New England Fan Favorite box. In a year where the “every team gets one All-Star rule” was clearly in play for the Red Sox, two-time reigning starter Devers was always likely the guy, but Verdugo absolutely did enough to make the conversation.
Guess not. The six AL finalists are Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, and Yordan Alvarez (superstars); Arozarena and García (played their way in); and Toronto’s Kevin Kiermaier — one of five Blue Jays who could win a runoff to start because even in an underachieving year, Canada stans Canada harder than you’ve ever stanned anything.
It’s impossible to get this deep without noting the National League totals, with J.D. Martinez tops among designated hitters, Mookie Betts second among outfielders, and Xander Bogaerts third among shortstops. I’ll leave it there because we’ve trod those latter two paths to dust, and Justin Turner has been everything a resurgent Martinez has.
But that’s also part of the point. Above and beyond Boston’s lack of success in constructing a major-league team since Dave Dombrowski was fired, it’s been done in a way where no one outside of Devers feels a part of anything substantial.
I’m trying to be fair about this. Four months into his tenure, Chaim Bloom was forced to dump both Alex Cora and Mookie Betts. He inherited elbow-compromised Chris Sale. COVID destroyed a season. A looming bargaining fight and a lockout blew up a winter. It has not been the easiest time to rebuild a franchise in some other image.
But we’re four years in and the Red Sox are without question a middling option in the American League. And they are undisputably the fourth most interesting team in Boston.
It is the sort of thing that used to prompt sudden action, and Theo Epstein to sit through meetings with NESN officials. “We Won’t Rest Until Order Has Been Restored.” Back when the Red Sox were regulars in baseball’s top three payrolls.
We’ve beaten that rug to death, too, Boston now 14th according to Spotrac. Times change. The parameters of the league and its playoff structure change. I get it.
But let’s be clear about this: It’s another reset year in Boston. After edging over the luxury tax number a year ago (with very little return on the investment), this year the Red Sox will avoid the second-time payor penalty unless something really weird happens.
It won’t get the play it got in 2020. We all remember how well that went over.
But that means it needs to be full go this winter. You would think that goes without saying, given the clock ticks louder each day given the degree the 2021 “two games from the World Series” season looks like the outlier.
The prospects are maturing. The homegrown rotation is materializing. Trevor Story’s elbow is healing. The Sale deal has just one year left after this one.
But this team needs to win, sooner than later. That used to go without saying on Jersey Street. Yet here we are watching a very good season by a notable character blow away in the wind, to the apparent disinterest of a sports-mad market.
If that doesn’t get the attention of those who led it to happen, maybe we all need to reassess what exactly we’re doing here.
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