(above : not an All-Star)

While Ted Berg is capable of focusing on a picture far bigger than Johan Santana’s NL All-Star Team snub, the ballot box-stuffing tactics of San Francisco fans fall under the statistical scrutiny of ESPN’s Keith Law, who takes a dim view of the Giants landing “three players in the starting nine, none of whom belongs there.”

 Buster Posey is a fine choice as an alternate behind Yadier Molina or Carlos Ruiz. Pablo Sandoval over David Wright, a longtime star having an MVP-caliber bounceback season now that he’s healthy again, is atrocious. And I’m not remotely a fan of putting a BABIP-fluke hitter such as Melky Cabrera in the game on that basis, let alone having him start over an established star such as Andrew McCutchen; Cabrera’s roster spot should have gone to Michael Bourn or, preferably, re-emergent Jason Heyward, who appeared in the All-Star Game as a rookie in 2010.

To change the topic a bit, there’s also the matter of the Giants going all out to secure Pablo Sandoval’s election. Unlike, say, Dino Costa’s growing number of Twitter followers, these were legit votes from actual, living, breathing human beings, most of them residing in a baseball market dwarfed by the one David Wright plays in. If Wright isn’t the face of the Mets franchise, he’s certainly the club’s premiere position player, one in the midst of bona fide career revival. That Wright couldn’t top Sandoval in the NL tally is no reflection on the former, but it says a ton about the relatively muted enthusiasm of Mets fans, even in the wake of the team’s dramatic improvement. Certainly the Mets have much bigger fish to fry than a public appeal to Wright’s ego, but in light of Fred Wilpon’s comments in the Spring of 2011, maybe they could’ve tried a bit harder.