With so many ways for players to make it to the All-Star Game nowadays, which voting constituency is best at choosing deserving players? Fans, players and managers all have chances to select players — who are the best talent evaluators?

To find out, we ranked all players in each league by Wins Above Replacement, then assigned a value to each constituency’s pick, based on the best player available at the position. For example, fans had the first pick of players, so to speak, so they had the entire pool to choose from. In the NL, the top first baseman by WAR is Joey Votto (indeed, he’s the best at any position). But fans chose Albert Pujols, who is second in the league in WAR at 1B; fans therefore earned a "2" for their pick.

We assumed the following "draft" order: Fans, players and manager. That is, after the fans were finished picking, we assessed the players’ picks based on the remaining players. When positions were prescribed — on the fan ballot (position-by-position) and on the player ballot, on which players had to select five starting pitchers, three relievers and eight so-called "position" players — we created tiers of available players. For example, on the fan ballot, fans choose three outfielders, so we grouped outfielders in tiers of three players each — if the fans had picked the top three outfielders in the league, they would’ve gotten a score of 1 in each outfield spot (rather than 1, 2 and 3). If a player was 16th-best or beyond, we simply scored the selection a 16 (the number of teams in the NL and therefore the number of players available at each position on the fan ballot). When it came to the managers, we created the tiers based on how they decided to structure their benches. For example, Charlie Manuel chose seven pitchers, so we structured the remaining unpicked pitchers in tiers of seven.

We then averaged each constituency’s scores to determine who is best.

Today, we’ll review the NL picks by constituency; we’ll cover the AL in a subsequent post.

National League

So how did they turn out? The players know how to pick ‘em:

Some observations:

• The NL players were spot-on with their starting-pitcher picks, choosing the top five in WAR. Either they read Fangraphs, or WAR matches up well with real-world experience. Or both.
• If you factor in the manager’s choices to replace Jason Heyward in the outfield and to choose a starting pitcher from the available roster, he does even worse. Of the healthy four reserve outfielders to choose from, Manuel picked Corey Hart, the worst of the lot. And of the starting pitchers, Manuel might’ve given the ball to either Roy Halladay or Josh Johnson, both of whom are superior to Ubaldo Jimenez.
• Fans redeemed themselves with their 34th-man pick of the league’s best player, Joey Votto. Otherwise, they would’ve had a 5.75 rating, about the same as the manager.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 7:11 pm 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.