MLB All-Star Game rosters if decided only by WAR

With the MLB All-Star Game less than two months away, it’s time to start thinking about potential rosters.

With the MLB season over one-fourth of the way complete, it’s time to start thinking about the symbolic halfway mark of the season: the All-Star Game. While the starting lineup is fan-voted, the reserves and pitchers are compiled by the coaching staff, led by Rob Thomson for the NL, and Dusty Baker for the AL. With personal biases and fan voting, they will not compose a perfect roster. If you wanted to make the most perfect possible roster (although never roster will truly be perfect), one solution would be using WAR: Wins above replacement

As said by FanGraphs, WAR (Wins Above Replacement) is defined as “an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic”.

It is essentially measuring how many wins a player can be valued for on their own. For example, Aaron Judge in 2022 had 11.5 Wins above replacement. If he were replaced by a replacement-level player (which currently is defined as a player that contributes 17.5 runs fewer than the league average through 600 PAs), the Yankees would have had close to 12 fewer wins than they had. As with most advanced metrics, there is a negative end of the axis to measure negative impact.

Some quick notes and disclaimers:

• Stats accurate as of the Morning of May 25th
• Shohei Ohtani is unfortunately not going to make the list because he does not lead in pitching or hitting even though he will 100 percent be an American League All-Star
• Lineups 1-9 are ordered by WAR
• The Benches are ordered by position. The bench in the all-star game is one backup per position.
• The Bench does not have a DH
• There are 12 pitchers. First 9 are starters, last 3 relievers.

With that being explained, let’s look at the American League roster first, starting with the Starting Lineup.