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Dear Royals Fans, this is Jose Altuve, the real All-Star

By Eric Huysman

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The rise of the Kansas City dominance of the All-Star game is starting to crack, with Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer losing ground to Josh Donaldson and Miguel Cabrera respectively. While I’m not saying that the two Royals players are having bad seasons, rather the other two are having drastically better seasons. While it’s understandable to vote for your hometown players to offer team support, but when your player has no business in the game, it’s a joke. While it can’t be totally blamed on the fans, the All-Star voting process has been all online this year, which needs to be changed.

A few weeks ago, CTH joined @JaysJournal and @MCB_Tigers to try to unseat a few Royals from the starting nine players in the All-Star game. Donaldson has overtaken Moustakas this week after Cabrera overtook Hosmer the week before. Houston, it is time for us to rock the vote to #VoteAltuve. While Jose Altuve may not be the best second baseman in the American League (in some people’s eyes), he is the best one that is closest to overtaking the current leader Omar Infante to start the game.

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At the time of writing this post on Monday June 29, 2015, Jose Altuve trails Omar Infante 7,514,642 to 7,282,934. Altuve has gained some ground on Infante only trailing by 231,708 votes compared to last week’s 435,540 deficit. Why have the other two hitters risen more than Altuve? Because he was nursing a hamstring injury and was going through a little funk for a while?

Jose Altuve did homer against the Royals, so maybe that will swing a few votes. While Jason Kipnis is arguably having a better season than Altuve, but he has only received 3,841,898 of the total votes. Let’s look at the three players numbers to see who really deserves the start at second base for the AL All-Star team.

Stats from MLB.com

As you can see, looking at these nine categories above, Jason Kipnis won six out of the nine categories. Altuve won the other three categories while Omar Infante was shut out of all nine categories. What this table above tells me is that if Altuve is not voted in by the fans, he probably will not make the All-Star game over Jason Kipnis. With the Royals flooding the All-Star voting process, it will leave out a few deserving All-Stars like Altuve.

If Jose Altuve is not the Astros representative at the All-Star game, who will be? Dallas Keuchel will be on that team, and is auditioning for the All-Star starting pitching assignment today versus the Royals and the AL All-Star team manager Ned Yost. If Yost really wants to win the All-Star game to give potentially the Royals home field advantage in the World Series, he needs to select the best players to represent the team.

Dallas Keuchel could have ten wins at the end of the game today so that he will be fighting Oakland’s Sonny Gray and Chris Archer for the start. George Springer and Will Harris have the numbers to be selected to the All-Star squad, especially after the amazing catch by Springer last night and Will Harris shutting the Royals down the last inning plus. The Astros are one of the best teams in the AL and deserve proper representation in the All-Star game.

Maybe Infante will come up with a mild hamstring strain and be unable to play. No, I do not wish this on him, however maybe he will do the right thing and step aside so Altuve can start, and Infante will be recognized by the crowd for his selection. Once again, I do not wish any harm to him because I don’t want the Royals to lose their All-Star player (sarcastic). Will he do this, probably not, but props to Royals fans for their selection.

Please use all your email addresses to #VoteAltuve, which you can do here.

You can read about his latest heroics from last night’s game here.

Next: Houston Astros will introduce Daz Cameron on Tuesday

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