Making a Rookie Mistake

Let’s see: Amid peace with the players’ union and the formation of a new and much-hyped marketing committee that includes prominent personalities in and out of the industry, hasn’t Commissioner Bud Selig repeatedly said that baseball has its best chance ever to grow the game?

Well, in leaving Dontrelle Willis off the National League All-Star team, some of that potential growth was temporarily stunted.

Talk about marketing gaffes.

No player has created a first-half buzz to match that of the Florida Marlins’ 21-year-old pitcher with his funky delivery, energetic personality and plain old good stuff.

No player had a better chance of capturing the interest and imagination of young viewers.

We should pause here to note that no selection system is perfect as long as every team has to be represented and fans tend to turn it into a popularity contest.

This year’s process, however, was vastly improved.

Fans demonstrated a keener awareness of first-half performance, and players, involved for the time since 1969, generally filled out the rosters in appropriate fashion.

That’s not to excuse the more than 100 players who failed to exercise their voting rights, including half of the New York Yankees, who had the gall to complain that none of their pitchers were voted in or selected by American League Manager Mike Scioscia and that they placed no players among the reserves after Jorge Posada, Alfonso Soriano and Hideki Matsui were picked as starters by the fans.

The Yankees, of course, were spoiled by the roster-stuffing of Manager Joe Torre in recent years, but neither Scioscia nor Dusty Baker, his NL counterpart, had that option in the new system.

Baker, however, did have two selections that Scioscia didn’t because the NL didn’t elect a designated hitter and the Colorado Rockies’ Shawn Chacon, one of five pitchers voted in by the players, had to be replaced because of injury.

Baker could have and should have selected Willis, and the MLB officials who worked with him on his selections should have recognized the impact Willis would have brought to the national stage and insisted on his selection, but it didn’t happen.

Baker added Russ Ortiz to his pitching staff, acknowledging that as his leading winner with the NL champion San Francisco Giants last year, Ortiz, now the leading winner of the Atlanta Braves, had made it possible for him to manage the All-Star team.

OK. Ortiz is 11-4 with a 3.50 earned-run average. No argument.

In replacing Chacon, however, Baker bypassed Willis (8-1, 2.13) and selected Kerry Wood of his own Chicago Cubs.

Wood leads the major leagues in strikeouts, but is 8-6 with a 3.36 ERA.

Baker said that Wood was next in line in the player voting, having finished sixth, and that he hadn’t even seen Willis pitch yet. He added he was leaning toward a more veteran staff for what is still an exhibition game that he is being asked to manage as if one of the regularly scheduled 162, because the winning league will get home-field advantage in the World Series.

It is difficult to believe, however, that Baker was doing anything but selecting one of his own.

It is also difficult to believe that he hadn’t caught Willis on the tube or that MLB wouldn’t have insisted on the selection of its hottest young property (although Wood brings his own speed-gun buzz to a game that will be played in Chicago).

At any rate, Baker will get a close-up look at Willis today, because he is scheduled to face the Cubs in Wrigley Field. There also is still a possibility he will be selected, if the Dodgers’ Kevin Brown has to be replaced because of his abdominal strain.

In reaction to last year’s 11-inning tie when both sides ran out of players, the rosters were increased by two players to 32, including 12 pitchers, but the indefensible need to still include a player from each team in a game that now counts for something continued to create problems for Scioscia and Baker.

It should never have come down to a choice between Wood and Willis, for example, but Baker was forced to select closer Mike Williams, who has an ERA over 6.00, to represent the Pittsburgh Pirates, and closer Armando Benitez, who has provided the back pages of the New York tabloids with so much negative fodder, to represent the Mets.

Twenty-nine players were selected for the first time, which spoke to the objective voting done by the players, and which was a factor in the exclusion of several All-Star regulars.

Among them were Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Sammy Sosa, who had been second in the NL’s next-to-last outfield tabulations but fell to fourth behind Albert Pujols, Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield. Those three also led the player voting, followed by Andruw Jones, Preston Wilson and Jim Edmonds.

It is not known how many player votes Sosa received, but the fact that he didn’t finish in the top six seemed to be a backlash to the corked-bat incident more than his injury-affected statistics.

Rejected by fans and players, Sosa also was rejected by his manager.

Baker said he weighed selecting him but felt it best for Sosa, considering his numbers failed to compare to those of the other outfielders, to “go underground” during the break rather than face a barrage of new questions about the corked bat.

Instead, there may be a barrage of questions directed at Baker and baseball over the snubbing of Dontrelle Willis.