Boston Red Sox: 3 players you must vote for on All-Star ballot
By Sean Penney
Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts
We should be able to lock in Xander Bogaerts for the third All-Star appearance of his career. Not only is he the obvious choice to start at shortstop for the AL squad, he’s arguably the front-runner for the MVP.
Bogaerts is third in the league with a .315 batting average, sixth with a .390 wOBA and seventh with a .912 OPS. He ranks sixth with 64 hits and 15 doubles while adding 10 home runs. Bogaerts is fourth in the league with 2.5 fWAR, which leads all shortstops.
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Bogaerts recently battled a frustrating slump, along with most of the Red Sox offense, but he snapped an 0-for-24 skid in the series finale in Houston on Thursday and now has consecutive multi-hit games to prove he’s back on track.
He enters the day with 203 at-bats, matching the exact total he tallied during last year’s shortened season. Bogaerts has either exceeded or come close to his totals from last season in essentially every category and he’s on pace to finish with similar results to his 2019 campaign when he was an All-Star, a Silver Slugger and finished fifth on the MVP ballot.
Working in his favor is that Marcus Semien, the former Oakland A’s shortstop who is having an excellent year in his own right, has played mostly second base for the Toronto Blue Jays so that’s where he now appears on the ballot. The closest Bogaerts has to competition is Carlos Correa but it’s hard to see any Astros players generating much fan support outside of Houston.
Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Bo Bichette and Tim Anderson warrant some consideration but none of them have matched what Bogaerts has done. They also lack the track record and name recognition of the Red Sox star shortstop. I would be surprising if Bogaerts doesn’t run away with the vote at this position.