The rosters for the 2023 All-Star Game are complete -- at least for now.
Sixty-four players were recognized when the selections for the Midsummer Classic were announced on ESPN on Sunday evening. That set of 64 standouts is assuredly temporary. By the time injury substitutions are made, along with allowances for unavailable pitchers, the number of players who can stake a claim to All-Stardom will swell to somewhere between 70 and 80, if this season is as typical as years past.
But, for the time being, players have been honored and others have been left out, a status that carries the unnecessarily negative label of "snub," which sounds like something out of a Victorian-era novel. ("I say, did you see me snub that chap?")
All in all, the selections were reasonable, and the ones that don't seem that great tend to fall under the umbrella of circumstance -- because you have to have so many relievers and catchers and such, and every team gets a representative no matter how many games it has lost.
To judge the selections, I had to pick my own teams first. I do this every season, and I am always reminded that it's harder than you think it would be. It's one thing to flag the 32 best first-half performers in each league. But it's quite another to satisfy the actual requirements that the rosters carry. It's a puzzle.
In the end, I matched the actual rosters on 45 of the 64 selections, 24 in the American League and 21 in the National League. Whether or not you consider that to be a high level of disagreement depends on what your standard is. The good thing is that, either way, we have some differences to discuss.
