Youthful faces and first-timers,
All-Star Game has familiar look with youthful faces
With the massive successes of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout in 2015 and a series of high-profile call-ups for players such as Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa and Addison Russell, it seems like baseball has as exciting a crop of young talent as it has had in years.
Harper and Trout, after all, are among the game’s youngest players: Trout turns 24 in August, Harper turns 23 in October.
But a closer look at the 2015 All-Star rosters suggests that the 2015 version of the event will not feature an atypical number of young stars. Using players’ age-25 seasons as the benchmark for “young” — since that’s about the age they’re expected to slow their improvement and hit their primes — shows 19 young players combined on the National and American League All-Star teams to date, with a few in the mix for the final vote.
There were 14 in 2014, 18 in 2013, 16 in 2012 and 18 in 2011. This season’s total is high, but it’s not extraordinarily high.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Though it will not feature a disproportionately high number of young players, the 2015 All-Star Game will feature more established young stars than ever before — at least if you base a player’s “stardom” on his number of All-Star selections.
Eight players 25 or younger will be returning to the All-Star Game for at least a second time in 2015. And in Trout, Harper, Jose Altuve, Madison Bumgarner, Salvador Perez and Giancarlo Stanton (who was voted in but is injured and will be replaced on the roster), this year boasts six players 25 or younger who are three-time AllStars. That has never happened before.
The distinction, though somewhat arbitrary, is no small achievement. Before this season, 74 players in baseball history were three-time All-Stars before turning 26. Of those eligible, 33 of 61 are in the Hall of Fame, and the set of active players who did it includes Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez and Clayton Kershaw. It turns out you have to be really good to make the All-Star team three times by age 25.
An exhaustive dive into BaseballCube.com’s collection of past All-Star rosters, dating to 1933, shows that no season before this one has seen as many young three-time All-Stars.
In six different seasons, there were as many as four — most recently in 1986, with Don Mattingly, Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and Cal Ripken Jr. Most Midsummer Classics featured zero or one.
And this season, again, has two more of those guys than in any year before. It’s not an entirely fair comparison, of course, since there are more All-Stars than there were in, say, 1970, when Catfish Hunter, Tom Seaver, Rod Carew and Johnny Bench were on their third or fourth All-Star appearances before age 26. But the point stands: We don’t often see so many players this young and this good.
So the perception that MLB features an abundance of young talent in 2015 is not just that. Anyone watching the sport this year probably could have guessed at it. There are always a lot of young players around the fringes of the All-Star rosters, but this season’s group will include an exciting crop of young superstars that few if any previous seasons can match.
It’s a cool thing, and it’s an exciting time to be watching baseball.