MLB's All-Star Team For 2nd-Half of 2024 Season

When we talk about a Major League Baseball player being named an All-Star, what we're really saying is that he was exceptional for the first half of the season.

All-Star voting begins at the end of May, starters are named in late June, the game is played in early July and everything after that doesn't factor into the mix, leaving "second-half All-Stars" like Lawrence Butler, Eugenio Suarez and others lacking for recognition.

Until now.

Based solely on what has happened since the All-Star Break, we've put together rosters of second-half All-Stars, using the same roster constraints as an actual All-Star Game.

(20 position players; 12 pitchers; at least one representative from each and every team.

Yes, even the White Sox were given a roster spot.) There is a fair amount of roster overlap with the actual All-Star Game.

Of these 64 players, 23 were among the 76 (including replacements) named to this year's midsummer classic.

But there sure are a lot of names on this roster who were not even remotely worth considering three months ago.

We'll declare a starter for each position before getting to the reserves and then the pitchers.

At the end, we've broken down the full rosters by MLB team.

Unless otherwise noted, statistics are from July 18 onward and are current through the start of play Sept.

28.

AL's Starting Catcher : Yainer Diaz, Houston Astros Right off the bat, we have to make one of the toughest calls of this entire exercise.

Cal Raleigh has been great for the Mariners, perhaps even more so with his glove than with the bat that has clubbed 12 second-half home runs.

Meanwhile, New York's Austin Wells stormed into the AL Rookie of the Year mix with a .952 OPS in his first 33 games after the All-Star Break.

But Diazstarting darn near every single game, either at catcher, first base or designated hitterhas been in some kind of a groove since late June.

He's batting .319 since the All-Star Break, but he has tallied at least three hits in 14 of his last 82 games played.

Bobby Witt Jr.

is likely going to win the AL batting crown, and he only has 20 such performances in the entire 2024 season.

Believe it or not, Diaz is second on the Astros in total hits this season, and he's not all that far behind Jose Altuve for the team lead.

NL's Starting Catcher : William Contreras, Milwaukee Brewers Much easier decision here.

Contreras has been the NL's most productive catcher with 12 second half home runs and an OPS north of .900.

He anchored Milwaukee's journey to becoming the first team to clinch a playoff spot this season.

And, frankly, the competition at catcher in the NL is nowhere near as impressive as it is in the AL.

AL's Starting First Baseman : Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Toronto Blue Jays Hopelessly overshadowed at an MLB-wide level by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani and wasting away on a Blue Jays team that might end up with the fifth-best odds of winning the 2025 draft lottery, Guerrero has quietly had maybe the best season of his career.

He entered play on Saturday with a 1.150 OPS in the second half, trailing only Judge in that department, more than 100 points ahead of Ohtani (1.048) Suffice it to say, if Toronto was hoping to get that long-term deal done with Guerrero this offseason, it did not get any cheaper over the past 10 weeks.

NL's Starting First Baseman : Matt Olson, Atlanta Braves Trying to keep pace with San Diego, New York and Arizona in the second half has been a struggle for Atlanta.

At least Olson finally woke up, though, so Marcell Ozuna didn't have to try to do it all by his lonesome.

Since entering the ASB with a meager 13 home runs and a .714 OPS, Olson is sitting at 16 and .912, respectively, in the second half.

It wasn't until mid-August that he really started to turn things around, and he has been particularly potent in September, batting .320 and averaging one RBI per game.

AL's Starting Second Baseman : Gleyber Torres, New York Yankees Midway through the year, Torres was a major contributor to the whole "the Yankees have no hitters aside from Judge and Soto" narrative.

Through 95 team games, the two-time All-Star had just a .297 on-base percentage and was giving them replacement-level production.

Since a couple of games before the All-Star Break, however, Torres is batting .296, getting on base better than 36 percent of the time and has been re-cemented in the leadoff role that he lost just two weeks into the season.

And since returning to that spot atop the lineup in mid-August, batting ahead of Soto and Judge unsurprisingly has made Torres the AL's leading scorer .

NL's Starting Second Baseman : Ketel Marte, Arizona Diamondbacks A tip of the cap to Gavin Lux for his summer surge.

The Dodgers second baseman had a .562 OPS at the All-Star Break, but practically doubled that to 1.020 in his first 41 games of the second half, allowing LA to put Mookie Betts back in his rightful home in right field upon his return from the broken hand.

However, Lux has cooled off big time in September, and that 1.020 OPS wasn't quite as impressive as Marte's second-half mark of 1.072 anyway.

Arizona's second baseman missed a few weeks around Labor Day with an ankle injury, but has picked up where he left off, setting new career highs for both home runs and RBI in a single season.

AL's Starting Third Baseman : Jose Ramirez, Cleveland Guardians You've been relentlessly bombarded with news of Shohei Ohtani's HR/SB quest, but did you know that Ramirez became just the second player in MLB history to have at least 38 home runs, 38 stolen bases and 38 doubles in the same season? Ohtani also joined that club a few days later, but it is just those two and Alfonso Sorianothe latter going for 51/41/39 in 2002 and 46/41/41 in 2006.

Needless to say, Ramirez has had a strong second half to get there, particularly in the base-swiping department, where his 23 stolen bases since the intermission put him behind only Victor Robles among AL speedsters.

Throw in the 15 home runs and 18 doubles while pacing Cleveland to a first-round bye and this one really was not a tough decision.

NL's Starting Third Basemen : Eugenio Suarez, Arizona Diamondbacks What a night and day transformation here, eh? In mid-June, there was speculation in the desert that the Diamondbacks might cut ties with Suarez once Alek Thomas finished his rehab assignment.

They ultimately demoted rookie Blaze Alexander instead, but with a .196 batting average, six home runs and a .591 OPS at the end of June, there's no question Suarez was on thin ice.

Since the beginning of July, though, he's batting .311 with 23 home runs and an OPS of almost 1.000, during which time the Diamondbacks went from a 41-43 afterthought to an offensive juggernaut that averaged 6.4 runs per game while going 47-29.

Suarez is far from the only reason they turned a corner, but his going from a liability at third base to maybe the most valuable third baseman in all of baseball sure did help them.

AL's Starting Shortstop : Bobby Witt Jr., Kansas City Royals Witt seems to be running out of gas in recent weeks as we approach the finish line of the season, but can you blame him? His months-long Hercules act of carrying this recently 106-loss team to a playoff spot has been the stuff of legend.

And even with his recent bout of mortality, he's still batting .347 with 16 home runs in the second half.

Of all the Witt-icisms you could possibly come up with, this is hands down the best one: Through Saturday morning, the Kansas City Royals offense was worth 20.3 FanGraphs WAR for the year.

Witt was at 10.3literally more than the rest of the team combined.

Yes, Mike Trout has had many a season where he was either right at or slightly above 50 percent of the Angels' offensive WAR, but never for a postseason team.

The lone year he went to the playoffs (2014), he was responsible for 27 percent of their offensive WAR.

NL's Starting Shortstop : Francisco Lindor, New York Mets Witt might be the unanimous runner-up for AL MVP, and Lindor could be in the same boat in the NL vote.

He's absolutely going to finish top 10 in that vote, despite not being named an All-Star, which was also the case in both 2022 and 2023.

The reason for it this season is that Lindor was woeful early on, batting .190 with a .617 OPS through 45 games.

Since mid-May, though, he has been an inferno, operating at 162-game paces of 204 hits, 37 HR, 100 RBI, 33 SB and 48 doubles.

AL's Three Starting Outfielders: If you have a problem with either of the Yankees appearing here, I don't know what to tell you, bud.

You might have been a bit heavy-handed with the acidic stuff in your Haterade, because they've been one of the best dynamic duos in a single season in MLB history.

Considering one has already signed a $360M contract and the other is probably getting a $500M deal this offseason, we should start calling them the Cash Brothers.

And then there's Butler, who has blossomed into a sensation for Oakland out of pretty much nowhere.

He was a sixth-round pick in 2018, never cracked the top 100 on a preseason scouting ranking and was a .195 hitter with six home runs in 94 career games played less than three months ago.

But since the beginning of July, Butler is batting .308 with 20 home runs and 14 stolen bases.

NL's Three Starting Outfielders: The Kids Are Alright, and they're far too young to appreciate that reference to a 1966 song by The Who .

At 24, Carroll is the wily ol' veteran of the bunch, who flipped a switch about a week before the All-Star Break to resume playing like the 2023 NL Rookie of the Year.

He was batting .210/.298/.310 with two home runs through 89 team games before exploding for .271/.360/.622 with 19 home runs over his next 61 contests.

21-year-old Merrill at least had a respectable first half with 12 home runs and a .745 OPS, but he is at 12 home runs (in 35 fewer games) with a .942 OPS since making the All-Star Game as a rookie.

20-year-old Chourio followed a similar script, going from a .678 OPS in the first half to a .919 OPS since mid-July, helping ensure Milwaukee didn't lose any ground after losing Christian Yelich for the year.

We expected a Jackson (Holliday) to win the AL Rookie of the Year, but both NL Jackson's should be top three finishers for that award instead.

AL's Starting Designated Hitter : Yordan Alvarez, Houston Astros Alvarez has been out since Sept.

22 after spraining his knee sliding into second base on a double, and it's unclear at this point whether he'll be available for the Wild Card Series.

That would be a massive bummer for Houston, because he had been on fire prior to the injury, including a four-hit game the previous day.

Alvarez posted an OPS of .960 or greater in each of the past four months after a bit of a (by his standards) pedestrian start to the season.

Alvarez went 20-for-43 with six home runs in the postseason last year, and he was gearing up for a similar tear through October.

NL's Starting Designated Hitter : Shohei Ohtani, Los Angeles Dodgers We've just about run out of unique ways to marvel at what Ohtani has done during this historic campaign, but let's give it another try.

Over his last 61 games, Ohtani has 25 home runs and 34 stolen bases.

The MLB leaders during the 60-game 2020 season were Luke Voit with 22 home runs and Adalberto Mondesi with 24 stolen bases.

(Remember those guys?) And in this entire 2024 season, the only other players with at least 25 home runs and 34 stolen bases are Elly De La Cruz (25/65) and Jose Ramirez (38/41).

Can't wait to see what he does in his first ever trip to the postseason.

Catchers Infielders Outfielders/Designated Hitters Of note, Colton Cowser was robbed by the "minimum of one player per team" rule.

The AL Rookie of the Year hopeful has been every bit as valuable as teammate Gunnar Henderson since the All-Star Break, but we had to find a roster spot for someone from Chicago, and Cowser just missed the cut because of it.

Beyond that, shouts to Victor Robles on one of the all-time great in-season turnarounds.

The Nationals cut him with a .120 slugging percentage in late May, but he reignited in Seattle, batting .328 with 27 stolen bases dating back to July 13.

And though his second-half on-base percentage (.324) pales in comparison to those of Juan Soto (.406) and Aaron Judge (.505 oh my word), Santander's 20 home runs in the second half puts him behind only Judge and Ohtani in that department.

His exploding for 44 home runs and 102 RBI in a contract year was quite the lucrative career choice.

Catchers Infielders Outfielders/Designated Hitters That's right.

We're awarding one of the roster spots for this fictitious exercise to Arizona's DH platoon.

Deal with it.

Pederson and Grichuk have combined for 18 second half home runs, each posting an OPS just a shade under 1.000, the former getting the starts against righties while the latter is in the lineup when there's a southpaw on the mound.

Beyond that package deal, there's a quite a bit of "had to pick someone from that team" on this list of reserves.

Stephenson, Burger, Swanson, Tovar and Wood are each the only second-half All-Star from their respective teams.

But while we *had* to include them, all except for Tovar might have made the cut anyway.

(FYI: Would have gone with Mookie Betts instead of Tovar if we could.

Decided to leave Betts off because he missed the first few weeks of the second half.) Stephenson has been the best NL catcher beyond William Contreras.

Burger has mashed 19 second-half taters.

Swanson has kind of quietly had a great second half after a rough first few months.

And after an initial adjustment period of a few weeks, Wood is batting nearly .300 with 21 extra-base hits and 12 stolen bases since July 27.

All good stuff.

The Starter : Tarik Skubal, Detroit Tigers Other Starters Though we did an unpopular opinions roundtable piece earlier this month where I attempted to make the case for Emmanuel Clase for AL Cy Young, Tarik Skubal has been outrageously good and is probably going to win unanimously.

In his nine starts since Detroit started to turn its season around, Skubal went 6-0 with a 1.94 ERA, 0.86 WHIP and 10.7 K/9this after he posted a 1.25 ERA over his final six starts of last season.

How fitting that arguably the best pitcher in baseball today come from the franchise that produced Justin Verlander.

Beyond Skubal, Houston's dynamic duo of Valdez and Brown has been putting on some kind of show in the second half, the former with a 1.96 ERA and the latter with a 2.26 mark while each making 12 starts.

One can only hope we end up with a Detroit-Houston pairing in the wild card round, as Skubal vs.

Valdez in Game 1 could be an all-timer of a postseason Southpaw Showdown.

Lopez had a phenomenal second half and was seemingly the only pitcher that could get some run support from the Twins offense as they fell apart at the seams.

Miller was even more dominant with a 1.89 ERA over his last 12 starts, albeit with nowhere near the run support that Lopez received, resulting in Seattle going just 6-6 in those games.

But shoutout to Kochanowicz, who made his MLB debut three days before the All-Star Break, got absolutely shelled in his first two starts and then became an ace after the Angels called him back up.

He had a 2.63 ERA over his next eight appearances, seven of them quality starts.

He doesn't generate many strikeouts, but he has one of the highest ground-ball rates and one of the lowest walk rates in the majors.

The 23-year-old might have legitimate staying powerand we had to pick someone from the team that just got swept by the White Sox.

The Starter : Chris Sale, Atlanta Braves Other Starters It is amazing how similar Sale's full-season numbers (18-3, 2.38 ERA, 225 K) are to Tarik Skubal's (18-4, 2.39 ERA, 228 K).

Nothing's set in stone yet, but they might both win the Triple Crown.

The only other time in the past 99 years that has happened was in 2011 when Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw pulled off the double dip.

Like Skubal, Sale has been particularly on point as of late.

Over his last 14 starts, he has gone 8-0 with a 1.93 ERA and an 11.5 K/9.

And his rookie teammate hasn't been far behind him, with Schwellenbach boasting a 2.65 ERA and 9.5 K/9 in his last 14 starts.

Elsewhere, take your pick from San Diego's rotation.

Cease, King, Joe Musgrove and Martin Perez have each made at least nine second-half starts for the Padres, all with an ERA of 2.66 or lower.

We settled on Cease and King, as they've made 13 and 11 starts, respectively, to Musgrove and Perez's mutual mark of nine, but good luck to everyone that has to deal with that rotation this October.

After starting the All-Star Game, Skenes has continued to dominate.

Because he didn't make his debut until mid-May, he's going to fall well short of the innings threshold for qualifying for an ERA title.

But heading into Saturday's start against the Yankees, he had a 1.99 ERA, which is just the 15th case in the past 30 years of a sub-2.00 ERA in a season with at least 130 innings pitched.

Hell of a rookie year.

Wheeler has been marvelous, entering Saturday's start against Washington with a 2.56 ERA for the year and quality starts in 11 of his 12 second-half outings.

Sale is all but certain to win NL Cy Young, but Wheeler sure has kept that race interesting.

And how about Snell? After entering July with a 9.51 ERA in six starts, he has put up a 1.23 ERA, 0.78 WHIP and 12.8 K/9 dating back to July 9.

He was the NL's Cy Yuk in the first half, but the 2023 NL Cy Young recipient is about to re-enter free agency with a whole heck of a lot of positive momentum.

What else is new, though? This year's split was a bit more drastic than usual, but for his career, Snell has gone 23-36 with a 4.35 ERA and 1.36 WHIP from Opening Day through the end of June, compared to 53-22 with a 2.34 ERA and 1.11 WHIP from July 1 onward.

At least Todd Helton having a career OPS nearly 200 points higher at Coors Field than anywhere else made sense.

Evidently, Snell just loves the summer.

The Closer : Emmanuel Clase, Cleveland Guardians Other Relievers Prior to this season, there had been one case in MLB history of a pitcher logging at least 70 innings with both an ERA below 0.77 and a WHIP below 0.77.

That remarkable feat belongs to Dennis Ecklersley, who ended 1990 with a 0.61 ERA and 0.61 WHIP, outlandishly racking up 73 strikeouts against just four walks (one of which was intentional).

Currently in possession of the exact same number of innings pitched as Eckersley had 34 years ago (73.1), Clase is about to join that exclusive club, sitting on a 0.61 ERA and a 0.655 WHIP (albeit with *merely* 66 strikeouts against 10 walks).

Of course, between 2021-22, he had a 1.33 ERA and 0.84 WHIP in 142.1 IP, so this is practically business as usual for him.

Much less so business as usual for Uceta, who entered this season with a 5.80 ERA in 40.1 career innings pitched with three different teams before becoming dynamite in Tampa Bay.

Since the All-Star Break, he has logged 29 innings with a 1.86 ERA and 14.0 K/9, going 2-0 with seven holds, five saves and no blown saves.

He is maybe the biggest reason the Rays darn near surged back into the wild-card picture despite blowing up the roster at the trade deadline.

Same goes for Holton, except the Tigers actually did storm all the way back into playoff position.

Dating back to June 29, Holton has given Detroit 52.2 innings pitched with a 0.68 ERA and 0.68 WHIP, going 4-1 with 10 holds, seven saves and no blown saves.

(The lone loss came last weekend when he was the opener against the Orioles and allowed a two-run home run in the first inning.) Lastly, Yates was just about the only Texas Ranger who exceeded expectation this season.

After posting a 3.28 ERA and 1.19 WHIP in mostly low-leverage situations last year with Atlanta, the 37-year-old reprised his 2019 role as one of the most impenetrable closers in the sport, racking up 32 saves and seven wins with a 1.19 ERA and 0.84 WHIP.

He only blew one save all season, and Texas still won that game.

The Closer : Raisel Iglesias, Atlanta Braves Other Relievers We won't call Puk the closer, as he has only saved three games all season.

But goodness gracious has he ever been great since Miami undid its attempt to make him a starter.

Dating back to June 19, Puksome with Miami, mostly with Arizonahas allowed one earned run in 43.2 innings pitched.

That's a 0.21 ERA, which also comes with a 0.55 WHIP and 14.0 K/9, which is pure madness for a period of more than half a season.

Then again, Iglesias had been even better prior to an implosion against the Dodgers on Sept.

15.

In the 30 games before that one, he had gone 35.1 innings without allowing an earned run with a WHIP of 0.42.

Getting Williams back from his back injury in late July has been clutch for the NL Central winning Brewers.

He did have one blown save where he just could not find the strike zone, but he has otherwise been just about flawless, striking out better than 45 percent of batters faced in his two months on the active roster.

Last but not least, how about Helsley leading the majors in saves for a team that's going to finish right around .500? Serious 2005 Chad Cordero (47 saves with a 1.82 ERA for 81-81 Washington) vibes here, with Helsley posting a 1.48 ERA in the second half en route to 49 saves for the year AL East AL Central AL West NL East NL Central NL West.

This article has been shared from the original article on bleacherreport, here is the link to the original article.