Mets’ Juan Soto To Start All-Star Game

Huzzah! He was ripped off last year by not making it.  Glad he got in as a starter this year. Each All-Star Game, I like to see which players reach or exceed 5 career All-Star Games. Five is a nice number where one starts to see that that player has 'recognized' greatness, not just statistical greatness or sabermetric greatness. Here are the 2026 All-Stars with 5+ ASGs under their belt now:

Mike Trout: 12
Freddie Freeman: 10
Chris Sale: 10
Aroldis Chapman: 9
Bryce Harper: 9
Aaron Judge: 8
Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.: 6
Shohei Ohtani: 6
Juan Soto: 5

Note the lack of pitchers with 5+ ASGs. We're in an era where there aren't too many career-great pitchers. There are season-great pitchers, or three-four year-peak great pitchers, but not a lot of career-great pitchers.

With 12 ASGs, Mike Trout joins pretty elite company. He's the first guy with 12+ ASGs since Miguel Cabrera. This is also the first All-Star Game since 2023 that has featured 3+ guys with 10 or more ASGs. The three then were Cabrera, Trout and Albert Pujols. 

Other than playing Springer's sinking blooper into a little league home run, Soto has not been the problem.  Offensively, he's been great despite getting basically zero help.  While being 33-37 with him in the lineup is far from good, it shows that the season would be a lot more salvageable if the team hadn't completely fallen apart without him.