Until Michael Young, who plays for the first-place Rangers, won the All-Star Game for the junior circuit, Met players David Wright and Carlos Beltran were the favorites to win the game’s MVP award. Was it a coincidence that the players for the National League’s top team had the NL’s most vital contributions?

Since this one “counted,” it’s worth trying to figure out whether the players who had a vested interest in the outcome of the game (that is, players on contending teams) actually performed better. It’s impossible to know for certain, but let’s review the performance of stakeholder players — which I’ll define as playing for teams with high E (Elimination) numbers — and non-stakeholders.

First, here’s the list of players who saw playing time in the All-Star Game, sorted by their team’s E number (division leaders have a *), then by WPA% in the game (thanks, as always, to Fangraphs for the data):

Fortunately, for the sake of argument, the biggest moment — Young’s hit off Hoffman — yielded offsetting WPA% for the two players, who both play for division-leading teams. Let’s look at the players for the top teams vs. those from the worst. The first 25 players from the top teams (72E and above) had a net WPA% of 17.0, whereas the last 23, from the worst teams (71-55E), had a net -17.0.

I decided to group players by their team’s E#, going with the worst teams’ players, then gradually including more and more players from better teams. The results?

Interestingly, the trend line shows that the more you isolate the worst team’s players, the worse the group performed. Put another way, the players with the least to gain from an All-Star Game win played the worst Tuesday.

Now, this is data from one game only, and my method is full of holes. Even if it weren’t, this wouldn’t prove anything. So if anyone has a different or more accurate take on this, I’d love to hear more. But, as it stands, the stakeholders seem to have been the more valuable players in this year’s midsummer classic, and those whose teams won’t care whether or not they’ll have home-field advantage come October played like it.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 1:53 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.