Tom Verducci’s list of All-Star Game things to watch starts with the man taking the ball for the American League: the Toronto righthander who once looked like one of the sport’s biggest pitching enigmas and now gets the stage he missed in 2022.
That snub stung all the more because he had put together a 2.15 ERA that season and led the league in strikeout rate before finishing as the Cy Young Award runner-up. Toronto still believed enough to make him the only free agent this winter to land a deal longer than five years, handing him $175 million over seven years.
At the time, plenty of people called it an overpay for a pitcher with a 3.88 career ERA who had never been an All-Star and had already bounced from the Cubs to the White Sox to the Padres after being drafted by Chicago. The stuff was always there; the results just lagged behind.
Toronto pitching coach Pete Walker had a simple way of describing what the club planned to do with him: “We’re going to Robbie Ray him.”
Ray arrived in Toronto as another arm whose command lagged behind his talent and left town with a Cy Young Award. When Verducci brought up that comparison, Cease laughed.
“It started,” he says, “with getting me more in the zone.”
The strange part is that he is actually throwing fewer pitches in the zone than he did a year ago, down to 42.1% from 46.4%. But he is getting ahead more often than ever, with a first-pitch strike rate of 64.1%, and that has helped him force hitters to chase at a career-best 32.9%.
There’s another wrinkle too: after years of searching for a usable changeup, he finally found a grip he trusts. He’s throwing it 11.5% of the time, a huge jump from 1.2% last year and close to his previous high of 12.7% in 2020.
The All-Star roster itself tells a familiar story about how these things are built. Out of 79 named All-Stars this year, 47 of them - 59% - were released, traded, or left their original clubs as free agents. That total comes after injuries and the usual round of “I’d rather not” RSVPs, and it still somehow does not include Zack Wheeler or Sonny Gray.
A few of the best examples of that churn are all over this game. The Dodgers once thought they were being asked for Yadier Alvarez in a deal with the Astros at the 2016 deadline, only to realize Houston wanted Yordan Alvarez instead.
Los Angeles had signed Yordan for “just” $2 million six weeks earlier, and the Astros had tried to land him too, with scout Charlie Gonzalez pushing for it. The Dodgers wound up sending Yordan Alvarez away for a middle reliever after he had been in the organization only six weeks and had never played in an affiliated game.
Clement’s path has been just as unlikely. The Guardians cut him in September 2022, then the Athletics released him in March 2023 after 102 losses, and he went home thinking his career might be over. The Blue Jays gave him another chance, and now he is the leading vote-getter on the AL All-Star team and baseball’s best bad-ball hitter, with 38 hits on pitches out of the zone.
Griffin’s road is different but just as winding. Once a hard-throwing Royals prospect drafted 28th overall in 2014, he blew out his arm, got traded to the Blue Jays in 2022, was released four months later after one major league game, and then went to Japan.
There he built out a deeper pitch mix and learned the fun of making the ball move in different ways. After three seasons overseas, he returned and signed a one-year deal with the Nationals.
Now he is 10-2 with a 2.77 ERA, making him 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.
Caminero’s rise has been even faster. The Guardians traded him to the Rays for Tobias Myers even though he had only 43 affiliated games under his belt, but the bat speed was already drawing Gary Sheffield comparisons. He is now in his second All-Star Game and is one of only nine players ever to reach 80 home runs in fewer than 300 career games.
Then there’s Trout, back in the All-Star Game for the first time since 2019 because injuries kept him out of the spotlight. He is a 12-time All-Star, grew up and lives in Millville, N.J., about 40 miles from Citizens Bank Park, and is a huge Philadelphia sports fan.
He’d fit as a right-handed bat on a Phillies team that could use one, but he told Verducci he has not spoken with his family about his future or with interim GM John Mozeliak about the Angels’ direction. For now, he is staying put, at least for the next three weeks.
Even so, Philadelphia will be ready for him. He’s one of their own, and baseball looks better when Trout is playing at this level.
The reunion angle is strong too. Trout and Bryce Harper, the 2012 Rookies of the Year, are sharing an All-Star Game for the first time since 2018, and both have earned it. Only Ben Rice and Sal Stewart have produced a better run value against four-seam fastballs this year than Trout and Harper.
And if this game ends the way last year’s did, with a swing-off deciding things again, the setup in Philly practically begs for Kyle Schwarber to be the choice. He won it for the NL last year, he came up just short in Monday’s Home Run Derby, and he should be back as the people’s pick if the game comes down to one more big swing.
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