Seattle Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki warms up before American League batting practice
If there's a reason to watch the All-Star game, played tonight at 8 p.m. at Seattle's Safeco Field — and even as a baseball fan, I've never been totally convinced there is — it's to get a good look at the two best teams in baseball in the same stadium (in the same dugout), and how they got that way.
The New York Yankees, World Series champions three years running, are sending six players to Seattle, thanks to designated manager Joe Torre's sense of loyalty and to the fact that the Yankees have many deserving players, the evidence being all those world championships.
Baseball fans selected absolutely none of them to be in the starting lineup.
The Seattle Mariners, far-and-away owners of baseball's best record at 63-24, are sending eight players, a full quarter of the squad and the most since the 1960 Pirates. Seattle fans, voting early and often, elected four of them — first baseman John Olerud, second baseman Bret Boone, designated hitter Edgar Martinez and straight-from-Japan outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, who received the most votes of any player — to start.
The other four — outfielder Mike Cameron and pitchers Freddy Garcia, Kazuhiro Sasaki and Jeff Nelson — are there thanks to Torre (and injuries to Yankee closer Mariano Rivera and token Devil Ray Greg Vaughn).
All eight Mariners are deserving, as are all six Yankees — they're the two best teams in the league and one of them is the home team, which should be enough for a "celebration of baseball" exhibition contest in the middle of a 162-game season. Celebration of baseball? The Mariners and Yankees are baseball at its best, and not just because since 1995 they've sprouted a rivalry hotter than any AL-NL faceoff. Because most of them aren't household names.
Superstars? The Mariners and their fans are understandably pleased as punch at the way this season is turning out — they lost franchise centerfielder Ken Griffey Jr. to free agency and his hometown of Cincinnati before the 1999 season, and Alex Rodriguez to a the biggest payday in baseball history, a ten-year, $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers.
At the mid-point of the season, the 33-54 Reds have the worst record in the National League; Griffey was neither voted onto the All-Star team nor selected by NL manager Bobby Valentine. His replacement on the Mariners, the aforementioned Cameron, got a rousing standing ovation in Seattle when his selection by Torre to replace Vaughn was announced during a recent game.
Rodriguez, one of the game's pre-eminent players and most popular stars, was voted onto to the team and is batting cleanup. His 35-52 Rangers are in last place in the AL West, 28 games behind the first-place Mariners.
The financially motivated loss of Griffey, Rodriguez and fireballer Randy Johnson in 1998 was supposed to consign the Mariners to eternal mediocrity. They had just reached a new plateau in the 1995 post season by coming from two games behind to edge the Yankees in a best-of-five game series that remains among the most exciting in recent years. Now they were being stripped apart, one star at a time, by baseball's merciless economics.
It was a sad sight to see in a city whose baseball history had been notably un-notable; here the Mariners were a few pitchers short of making Seattle a baseball town to be feared, and their stars — the heart of their team — were fleeing town for sunnier climes. The only star in town was going to be Starbucks, and Seattle, as a baseball town, was going back to being Milwaukee.
And so the lesson of this year's All-Star Game seems to be that the stars weren't the heart of their team after all. Yes, there's "Ichiro," the better-than-anybody-expected Japanese import who's not only leading the team but putting countless fannies in the Safeco seats (and drawing big ratings in Japan for the Mariners' 4 a.m.-in-Tokyo satellite feeds).
But the Mariners are now made of players like Edgar Martinez, a quietly stellar hitter who will be batting .300 with 125 RBIs well into his 50s. Bret Boone and John Olerud are fine players and deserving, but superstars? More like hometown voting passion. Likewise Cameron, Garcia, Sasaki and Nelson — none of these guys are going to make Rodriguez-type money or do Griffey-type commercial endorsements.
The Yankees have Clemens and Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams, who are at least in the same Q-rating ballpark as Rodriguez and Griffey, but for the most part they're a team (if a deep and well-paid one) of hard-working below-the-fold-ers who happen to add up to championship after championship. After championship.
And they need their manager playing favorites to get any of them into the All-Star game.
Players like Manny Ramirez, Juan Gonzalez, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds are what the All-Star Game is all about — stars. Stars that have fans beyond their cities of employment (they'd better, the way these guys chase a buck around), stars that hit big, earn big and even occasionally win big.
That's who the fans want to see on the big mid-season stage (plus Cal Ripken)? Fine. It'll be the high point of the season for most of these guys — the combined fan-elected starting lineups of the AL and NL have all of two World Series rings between them. "Star" is an individual term, and these guys, by themselves, are the ones putting up the numbers.
The best thing about tonight's All-Star Game is that the other best players in baseball — the ones playing for the best teams — will be at Safeco Field too. But when the ump yells "Play Ball" and the joyous, caffeinated Seattle crowd goes wild, the best place to look for most of them will be on the bench.