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The Weekend Buzz while you were boxing out your neighbors at the mall for an iPhone. ...
1. The All-Star Game: Time again for everybody's favorite Midsummer Classic: Trying to guess why Manny Ramirez will beg out of this year's game.
Sore knee? Ill relative? Hair-extensions appointment?
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| Florida's Miguel Cabrera should be the NL starter at third base. (US Presswire) |
Yes, you. At least, I'm assuming you cast an All-Star ballot this year, otherwise, you probably would be reading some other website column devoted to, I don't know, soccer or gas grills right now. (If you know of any soccer websites, by the way, I'll pass. But if you've got gas grill tips or old family recipes, I'm all ears).
This time, you only messed up in a few places in your voting. I tried to help best I could with two columns last week, one listing my AL All-Star team and another charting my NL team, and mostly, you listened and took good notes.
There are a couple of key places you didn't, however. And though at least none of them rank as a travesty this year, the starting lineups will be a bit sloppy in these areas:
AL Catcher: Detroit's Ivan Rodriguez will start, and he's all but punched his ticket to the Hall of Fame, but Cleveland's Victor Martinez deserves to be catching in the first inning. His offensive numbers across the board are so much better this year that even Pudge's superior defensive skills can't overcome them.
AL Shortstop: Wrong Tiger, wrong place, wrong time. While Rodriguez shouldn't start behind the plate, Carlos Guillen should be in the lineup at shortstop. No offense, Mr. Derek Jeter, but as I wrote last week, Guillen is criminally underrated. Jeter is hitting .338 with a .411 on-base percentage, so it isn't as if this is an egregious oversight, but Guillen has 20 more RBI and has scored only eight fewer runs. And he's very good defensively.
NL Third Base: You said David Wright. The correct answer should be Florida's Miguel Cabrera. This one, I'll absolve most of you in other locales and blame on all the folks voting in New York. What, Rusty Staub wasn't on the ballot so you couldn't vote him in, too? Wright is going to be an All-Star lineup fixture for years -- but this shouldn't be one of them. By his own admission, he had a miserable April. "I've had funks," was the way he put it to me during a conversation in Dodger Stadium a couple of weeks ago about his month of April. "But as far as lack of production, that might have been the worst."
Other than third, you did very well in the NL. A couple of things I'd quibble with, but nothing that should keep us up all night arguing.
No, the most fascinating development of all -- in either league -- was that San Francisco had to kick its marketing department into high-alert status and paper the house when it came to the resident Hometown Favorite*.
Between the penultimate release of the All-Star voting results and the final count on Sunday, Barry Bonds* made up 119,158 votes on Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano to earn a starting position in what very well could be the final All-Star Game for Bonds* and shove Soriano onto the NL bench.
