The injustice! The travesty! The horror! The horror!!! How dare Major League Baseball snub Jered Weaver for the American League All-Star Team?!?! I’m downright apoplectic, shocked, flabbergasted, stupefied and… well, actually, I’m kind of OK with it.
I would have liked to see Jered Weaver make the All-Star team as much as anyone else, but maybe this snubbing could turn out to be a good thing?
What’s a guy got to do to get a little respect around here?
There is no doubt that Jered Weaver deserved to be an AL All-Star, possibly even the starting pitching in the Mid-Summer Classic. He is the MLB leader in strikeouts and top six in ERA, WHIP and WAR amongst AL pitchers. Factor in the obvious issue that the game is playing in the guy’s home stadium and this might go down as one of the most mind-numbing All-Star omissions in recent history. That’s just the thing that should really get a young player still looking to prove that he belongs amongst the MLB elite riled up.
Weaver set out this season to prove that he was the ace the Angels had been looking for. With half a season in the books, Weaver has done more than enough to earn the title of staff ace. If not for the bullpen failing to hold onto a number of his leads, his 2010 resume would be so damned impressive that there would have been no way that he would have been overlooked for the All-Star team, but alas, the bullpen cost him multiple wins and here he is poised to spend the All-Star break watching the game from his living room, stewing in his own dejection.
(Mr. Burns voice) Excellent.
Jered has spent the first half of this season proving all of those detractors who thought he didn’t have the goods (yes, we get it, he is flyball prone, thanks for pointing that out again) to become a top of the rotation starter wrong. Now, just in case Weaver was starting to feel a little too good about himself, he gets a fresh dose of disrespect to stoke his competitive fire.
He has been dominating the league thus far by way of the motivation of stepping into John Lackey’s shoes as staff ace. Just imagine what he is going to do now that he has been passed over twice now for the All-Star team (since Andy Pettitte was tabbed as an injury replacement for Clay Buchholz) despite the gaudy numbers he has been putting up? After all, it is the players that vote for the pitchers in the All-Star Game, not the fans. To not be voted in by the players is the ultimate insult to a pitcher since it pretty much means that even though he has been mowing batters down, opposing hitters still don’t fear him like they should.
Even though he seems like a laid back surfer dude, that kind of a slight is going to make Jered Weaver angry and AL hitters aren’t going to like him when he is angry.
The best thing about Weaver’s snubbing is that it is the best kind of insult for a player to receive. He gets to be insulted and subsequently outraged, but in a context where the insult doesn’t really count. Let’s not forget, we are talking about a stupid exhibition game here. This should really be a “no harm, no foul” situation, but while there really isn’t any harm involved (especially since Weaver wouldn’t have pitched in the game anyway), he still got fouled and fouled hard to enough to want to make his offenders pay. My hunch is that the AL players are going to rue the day they failed to vote Weaver into the All-Star Game.