Five things I’m watching for in the All-Star Game tonight:
1. Dylan Cease gets his moment.
The Toronto righthander starts the All-Star Game for the American League. His only previous connection to the All-Star Game was as an all-time snub in 2022, when he had a 2.15 ERA and led the league in strikeout rate. He would go on to finish as the Cy Young Award runner-up.
This winter he was the only free agent to sign a deal of more than five years. Toronto gave him $175 million over seven years. Some people called it an overpay for a guy with a 3.88 career ERA who had never made an All-Star team and had bounced among three organizations, having been drafted by the Cubs and traded to the White Sox and then to the Padres. His results never quite matched the quality of his stuff.
Toronto pitching coach Pete Walker told me at the time, “We’re going to Robbie Ray him.”
Ray came to Toronto as an underachiever who wasn’t in the strike zone enough. He won a Cy Young with the Jays.
Cease laughed when I reminded him of Walker’s plan.
“It started,” he says, “with getting me more in the zone.”
Oddly, Cease is throwing fewer pitches in the zone than he did last year (42.1%, down from 46.4%). But his first-pitch strike percentage is better than average for the first time in his career (64.1%). And by controlling count leverage more, he is getting hitters to chase at an all-time high rate (32.9%).
Moreover, after years of searching for a changeup, he finally found a grip that has given him the confidence to throw it 11.5%, up from 1.2% last year and close to his all-time high pitch usage from 2020 (12.7%).
2. The many long journeys to the All-Star Game.
Where do All-Stars come from? Most of them do not come from the organization that originally signed them.
After all the injuries and “I’d rather not” RSVPs, there are 79 named All-Stars this year. (And somehow, Zack Wheeler and Sonny Gray are not among them.) Of those 79 All-Stars, 47 of them (59%) were released, traded or left their original team as free agents.
The wildest roads to the All-Star Game are:
Yordan Alvarez, Astros: Traded before playing an affiliated game.
The Dodgers needed a middle reliever at the 2016 trade deadline. They wanted Josh Fields from the Astros.
The Astros said, “Okay, you trade us Alvarez, the Cuban free agent you just signed.”
The Dodgers said, “No way. We just gave him a boatload of money.”
The Dodgers thought they meant pitcher Yadier Alvarez, a Cuban pitcher they signed at a cost of $32 million. ($16 million signing bonus; $16 million tax penalty.)
The Astros said, “No, not that Alvarez. Yordan Alvarez.”
The Dodgers had signed Yordan for “just” $2 million just six weeks prior. The Astros, on the advice of scout Charlie Gonzalez, had tried to sign him but lost out to L.A.
“Oh, O.K.,” the Dodgers said.
The Dodgers traded Yordan Alvarez for a middle reliever after Alvarez had been with them only six weeks and never played in an affiliated game.
Ernie Clement, Blue Jays: Released twice within six months.
First the Guardians cut him in September 2022. Then the Athletics, a team coming off 102 losses, released him in March of 2023. Clement went home thinking his career might be over.
The Blue Jays called and here he is as the leading vote-getter on the AL All-Star team and, with 38 hits on pitches out of the zone, the best bad-ball hitter in baseball.
Foster Griffin, Nationals: The 30-year-old rookie who was released and went overseas.
Once a hard-throwing Royals prospect drafted 28th overall in 2014, Griffin blew out his arm, was traded to the Blue Jays in ’22, was released four months later after one major league game with Toronto and signed to pitch in Japan, where he developed a deeper arsenal of pitches and discovered the joy of making the ball move different ways. After three years there he returned to the states, signing a one-year contract with the Nationals. At 10–2 with a 2.77 ERA, Griffin is the first U.S.-born rookie age 30 or older with 10 wins and a sub-3 ERA since “Jittery” Joe Berry with the 1944 Philadelphia A’s.
Junior Caminero, Rays: Traded at 18 years old with elite bat speed.
The Guardians sent Caminero to the Rays for pitcher Tobias Myers even though the teenaged Caminero had played only 43 affiliated games while showing Gary Sheffield-like sick bat speed. Now Caminero is in his second All-Star Game and is one of only nine players all-time with 80 home runs in less than 300 career games.
3. The ovation for Mike Trout leading off the game.
Trout is a 12-time All-Star, but because of injuries this is the first time he is playing in the All-Star Game since 2019, when baseball was played without the universal DH and without a ban on shifts. Trout grew up and lives in Millville, N.J., 40 miles away from Citizens Bank Park. He is a huge Philadelphia sports fan who would be a perfect addition to a Phillies team searching for a right-handed bat. But Trout told me he has not talked with his family about his future nor with interim GM John Mozeliak about the direction of the Angels. He’s not going anywhere, at least in the next three weeks.
But Philadelphia fans will cheer him because he’s one of their own—and because baseball is better when Trout is playing at an All-Star level.
And how’s this for classic rock reunions: Trout and Bryce Harper, the 2012 Rookies of the Year, are playing in the same All-Star Game for the first time since 2018, and deservedly so. Only Ben Rice and Sal Stewart this year have a better run value against four-seam fastballs than Trout and Harper.
4. A Kyle Schwarber swing-off encore.
Why not a second straight tied All-Star Game decided by a swing-off competition? And with the game in Philly, Schwarber, who won it for the NL last year, absolutely must return as the people’s choice to try to do it again—especially after he narrowly fell short in the Home Run Derby on Monday.
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