San Francisco Giants: All-Star Ballot Update
The first update on the official All-Star Voting came out this week, and there weren’t too many surprises.
Bryce Harper led all N.L. players with over a million votes, while many players who haven’t put up big time numbers but have big time names led the majority of the positions.
Without getting off into a tangent about the fan favorites that get in whether they deserve it or not – such as Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones – the All-Star voting process has long been little more than a popularity contest.
The San Francisco Giants are one of the most popular teams in the league, yet have no one in line to start the All-Star game. They may not have anyone leading the way at their position, but they do have several players with a chance to make a run for a starting job.
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Catcher Buster Posey has the most total votes of any Giant, with over 700,000. While this is great, he’s still nearly 100,000 votes behind the leader Yadier Molina of the Cardinals. Posey ranks second in most offensive categories, which should garner him a spot on the roster if not the starting job.
At first base, Brandon Belt‘s rocky start to the season likely hampered any hopes of an All-Star bid, no matter how hot he’s been in the last few weeks. Even if he did get off to a decent start, he likely wouldn’t beat the likes of Adrian Gonzalez or Anthony Rizzo in a popularity contest.
The same can be said about a certain former third baseman, who currently is about 80 miles away in Sacramento. Third base on the national stage used to belong to the likes of a certain martial arts creature, but now is up for grabs between a crop of young talent like Kris Bryant of the Cubs.
At shortstop, one would think the guy with the best stats at this point in the season would naturally win, but once again, conventional logic is thrown out by the mass of voters, going with seemingly everyone but Brandon Crawford.
Crawford is leading the Giants and all N.L. shortstops with 31 RBI to date, and is in the upper tier of just about every other offensive category. Without even getting into his stellar defense, he deserves to be much higher up in the voting than where he currently stands, fifth.
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Rounding out the infield, Joe Panik, the second basemen for the Giants, ranked fifth in the first round of voting, losing out to the red hot Dee Gordon from the Marlins. Panik likely won’t win it this year, but is a great candidate to be a breakout star somewhere down the line.
As for the outfielders, where the top three vote-getters are the starters, there are two Giants just barely behind the leaders.
While Nori Aoki and Angel Pagan are both in the top five, the top three are vastly ahead of the Giants duo. Harper, Matt Holliday, and Giancarlo Stanton are all over 300,000 votes in front of them.
Hunter Pence, while likely the best of the Giants outfielders, has little hope of reaching the All-Star game due to missing most of the season so far. Aoki’s outstanding average is all that is keeping him afloat right now in a sea of talented home run hitters.
If Giants fans really get into it, Matt Duffy could potentially receive some write-in votes, but his small role early on and lack of household name recognition will likely keep him out of the race this year.
Like Panik, Duffy also has shown he has the potential to not just be an everyday starter for the ball club by the bay, but also for an All-Star team one day.
Given how popular the Giants have been in recent years, it may be shocking to think that the last infielders to start an All-Star game for the team were Jeff Kent and Rich Aurilia in 2001.
Even with popular players like Pablo Sandoval, Freddy Sanchez, Juan Uribe, and Marco Scutaro, the big-time fan bases such as St. Louis seem to always have won out.
Even though the Giants showed up in the primary voting, it’s going to take a lot more Giants faithful to flock to the polls to guarantee any results.