The All-Star Ballot

The Jays are off today, so today's a good day to talk about the All-Star game.

As you may or may not have heard, All-Star voting is in full-swing.  The game itself isn't until July 12th, and voting ends before that at 11:59 PM ET on June 30th.  The rules are simple: per e-mail address, you have 25 votes.  So who goes from the Blue Jays?

The obvious first choice is Jose Bautista, so we're going to exclude him from the list.  I think a lot of people will end up voting him in anyway - at the time of writing (which was Friday afternoon, with only 25 games played), J-Bau is on pace for at least 28 homers, 45 RBI, and 90 walks.  Oh and 93 hits.  Is this a little unrealistic by the 76-game mark?  I'm not sure.  But I think Bautista will at the very least have 20 homers by that point, and still be leading the AL.

So who to choose?  Well, I guess it helps to pick only those Blue Jays who are actually on the ballot.  Excluding Bautista, these include: 1B Adam Lind, 2B Aaron Hill, SS Yunel Escobar, 3B Edwin Encarnacion, C JP Arencibia, DH Juan Rivera, OF Rajai Davis, and OF Travis Snider (who of course was just demoted - so I think he's out).  I decided to just look at OPS (I know, it's a sabermetric...but it's the one I vaguely understand) to figure out who has, up til now, given the Jays the best chance at scoring runs.

Arencibia has the highest OPS of all of them, with 0.805.  Escobar and Lind are pretty close, coming in at .757 and .730 respectively.  After that they're all respectable, with the exception of Davis - who is the lowest at .344, but to be fair, he's missed quite a few games due to injury..

Given this information, I think only Lind and Arencibia are the only Jays (again, other than Bautista) who have a shot at making the all-star team.  I'm going to go ahead and predict now that the only Jays player to go to Arizona will be Jose Bautista, with Lind coming very close but just losing out.  I don't think the other members of the Jays have made a big enough splash compared to Jose.  Still, I have at least four e-mail addresses so I am going to put my 100 votes to good use and get our Jays in there.