The 10 best active MLB players who have never made an All-Star team

A.J. Burnett was once the prize of two different free agency periods. The Blue Jays signed him to be a solid, above-average pitcher, and that’s what he was. The Yankees signed him to do the same thing three years later, and it didn’t work out until they shipped him to the Pirates. Still, he’s been a mostly productive pitcher, with the ups and downs that you might expect, appearing in six different postseason series, throwing a no-hitter, getting attacked by rosin bags, the works. He’s also made over $144 million in his career because he can throw baseballs better than most.

Before this season, though, he had never made an All-Star team.

According to Baseball-Reference’s wins above replacement, Burnett was the biggest career snub. Even though he’s been a big part of the plans for several teams, he never once snuck onto a roster. Which leaves the obvious question: Who are the best players in baseball today who have never made an All-Star team?

We’ll rank them, using a measure of wins above replacement and good ol’ subjective nonsense. Note that Brett Gardner would be at the top of the list, but I’m going to assume he either wins the Final Vote or gets on as an injury replacement this year. If he doesn’t, well ... he’s very, very good, and he should have made the team this year in the first place.

He’s the lowest by WAR of the 10, mostly because he’s still a relative newcomer, having been a full-timer for just four years now. He looked like a near lock as of June, but a .267/.294/.400 slump since May 31 has tempered his overall numbers.

Still, he seems like someone who should have made a team already, considering he’s on the flashier side of baseball life, hitting dingers, throwing runners out from the warning track and looking like a member of Amon Amarth the whole time. He’s still just 28, so there’s plenty of time. Like some of the other players on this list, there’s a chance that he’ll get a nine-figure payday before his first MLB All-Star appearance, though.

I’m still not used to the idea of Corey Kluber, super-ace, mind you. He wouldn’t have made a 50-deep list of Cy Young candidates before last season, so we shouldn’t pretend that he’s a long-suffering snub. Still, he’s clearly one of the best pitchers in the game right now, even if the Indians are somehow 5-13 in his starts this year. His FIP suggests that he’s been supremely unlucky, and your eyeballs should, too.

Without looking, I’m going to assume the Indians have Adam Dunn at shortstop, or something.

He’ll get there. It’s just an uphill battle for defense-first shortstops, if only because there are usually a couple of shortstops every year who can field and hit at the same time. Simmons is hitting a little more this year than he has in the past, but he has a long way to go to be in that Ozzie Smith/Omar Vizquel class of slappy, productive, insanely valuable defense-first shortstops. Both of those two developed late offensively, but there are always Elvis Andruses around to remind us all that young players don’t have to improve just because they’re young.

Still, I’ll put even odds on Simmons hitting .300 for a half and making a roster easily within the next two years. This is just a temporary ranking.

In the eight seasons Headley was with the Padres, they finished under .500 six times. In a system where every team gets an All-Star, it doesn’t make sense that Headley couldn’t crack through. But there’s a very good reason for his lack of All-Star selections: Adrian Gonzalez. He was always the token selection (probably because he deserved it most years). When Gonzalez left, Heath Bell and Huston Street were the designated ugh-fine-we’ll-take-a-Padre picks.

Headley’s best season was 2012, but almost all of the insanity came in the second half of the season. The next year, he had a poorly timed slump in June, with an OPS under 700 when All-Star selections were made, so Everth Cabrera made the team, instead. So it goes for Headley, who doesn’t look like he’ll be in consideration for the AL team any time soon.

Another ex-Padre that makes no sense as a perennial snub, considering the general quality of his co-workers. Unlike Headley, though, this one doesn’t make sense. The Padres were the surprise darlings of the 2010 first half, and Latos was their best pitcher. At the All-Star Break, he was 10-4 with a 2.45 ERA, leading the league in batting average against. A partial list of pitchers who made the team over Latos:

Notice a theme? Eight relievers made the National League roster that year. Latos started both 2011 and 2012 slowly, and he was hurt for the first half of 2014. On the one hand, this is the most egregious snub of the bunch. On the other hand, I exist to Waldorf and Statler the guy until he retires, so it’s not exactly hurting my fingertips to type all this.

Maybe I just follow the National League more closely, but this one surprised me for a couple reasons. First, Santana used to be a catcher, one of the better hitting catchers in the game, and you know the managers who were picking the teams during that time weren’t sitting down with a table of pitch-framing numbers and saying, “Well, actually.” He was a catcher who could rake.

Second, in an era where power is down substantially, it seems like any player who could consistently hit 20 homers or more would have snuck onto an All-Star roster by now.

Third, his nickname is Slamtana, and I feel like that should be rewarded somehow.

Instead, he’s still tied with Casey Blake in All-Star appearances. As with Reddick, though, he’s under 30. He has time. Just like everyone on the rest of this list did at one point before they got older ...

This is apparently a genre. Former Marlins youngsters who throw no-hitters and stay generally productive after they leave for more money don’t make All-Star teams. Use that to win money gambling in the future, and give 10 percent to me as a finder’s fee.

In a way, it’s not surprising that Sanchez is on the list -- his career ERA+ is 113, and every year, he’s right around that mark. In five of the last six seasons, his ERA+ has been between 106 to 117. That’s remarkable consistency, and the kind that rewards the team more than the individual player.

in 2013, though, Sanchez finished fourth in the Cy Young voting, and a fast start helped get him there. In his last start of April, he struck out 17 batters and ended the game with a season ERA of 1.34. His numbers at the break were definitely worthy of consideration, but he left his June 15 start with a shoulder strain and was left off the team.

The new leader in non-All-Star WAR, Crisp doesn’t take the top spot because he’s usually been a player to appreciate in a general sense, not as the kind of on-base monster the #1 player was. Crisp used to do everything well -- running, fielding, hitting for a little power -- and his best chance probably came in 2005, when he had an excellent first half, but the scrappy, slappy Scott Podsednik was apparently trendy back then, and he made the team, despite numbers that didn’t compare.

Podsednik would finish his career with 6.9 WAR, or about two more than Crisp finished the 2005 season with. But now we’re nitpicking, probably because it’s kind of depressing to note how bad (and hurt) Crisp has been this year. The All-Star window is probably closed for Covelli, and that’s a shame.

Okay, I get that Headley was in the shadow of Adrian Gonzalez, so that when it came time to satisfy the one-player-for-every-team rule, it wasn’t even a debate. But Markakis was with the Orioles when they were awful, and he was the face of the franchise for a bit. Here are the players who made it over him during his Orioles tenure:

Do you see how that worked? There was always one, only one, All-Star for the Orioles. Never more. When managers got desperate trying to add an Oriole to the roster, they looked for the closer or the dude with the highest batting average. At the break in 2008, Markakis was hitting .301/.402/.493. But Terry Francona took just three outfielders for the bench, and all of them made sense at the time. Timing is what keeps Markakis off the All-Star teams and gets Kevin Correia and Mark Redman on. It’s just odd that he was never the best Oriole on a team, when there were so many bad Orioles teams.

If you made a “most underrated players” list from 2008 through 2013 and didn’t include Choo, they broke down your door and took your children away. Everyone knew that Choo was underrated, and that almost made him overrated, but just the thought of him being overrated made him underrated again. For two straight years in Cleveland, Choo hit over .300, was among the league leaders in on-base percentage, and slugged close to .500.

Choo’s problem: too consistent. He never had one of those wacky first halves, where he’d hit 15 homers and get on base 48 percent of the time, only to regress to the mean in the second half. He was always calm and cool, hitting for average (but not that high), getting on base (but not that much), and hitting the occasional dinger (but not that many). He probably deserved a selection or two, but there was always an outfielder who wasn’t so consistent and accumulating all of his value in the first half. That’s how the AL got Jason Bay starting in left field one year -- he was a known quantity who had a bananas first half.

The perennial snub didn’t hurt Choo in free agency, of course, and now he’s in the second phase of his career, where he’s still making lists, but the wrong lists for the wrong reasons.

Three or four of these players will eventually take the Burnett route, making a team after a surprisingly hot start. Most of them, though, are on the Tim Salmon track. Even if they’re all multi-millionaires because of their superlative baseballing, there’s no way it can’t bug each and every one of them.