E-Mail This Article to a Friend The American League’s All-Star game rosters, and the Jekyll-and-Hyde Sox visit the Bronx BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

Each year since the ’70s, Major League Baseball has allowed the fans to pick the starting players for each league’s roster for the annual midsummer All-Star game. The balance of each team’s roster was assembled by the manager of the team that participated in the most recent World Series. In the past, fans have at times selected players based purely on marquee value and not on stats, and the reserves were laden with players who were on the respective managers’ teams, worthiness be damned.

This year, the America continued to pick the starters, and with Internet voting now commonplace, it’s even easier for obsessed fans to make sure that their favorites get 25 votes at a time than in the days when they had to rely on a handful of ballots passed out at Major League ballparks. The reserves, however, are now done in a different manner: they are chosen by the ballplayers themselves, with little input from the managers and coaches involved. Why? Because as FOX-TV relentlessly tells us on its Saturday-afternoon broadcasts: THIS TIME IT COUNTS! Well, truthfully the result of next Tuesday’s All-Star game will not count in the standings, but the winner will accrue one of those sacred bonuses: the potential home-field advantage in this October’s World Series. This all came about as a result of the fiasco that was last year’s " classic " in Milwaukee, when All-Star managers Joe Torre and Bob Brenly managed their rosters so poorly that they had run out of pitchers by the 11th inning. Commissioner Bud Selig looked like a buffoon for declaring the game a 7-7 tie, but in reality it was the foresight-challenged skippers who were responsible for the late-night fiasco.

With such a prize now hinging on the outcome of the game, baseball wants to make sure that the rosters feature the best players from each league, so that they can actually try to win the game. After all, THIS TIME IT COUNTS! So did the sport’s major-domos and supposedly knowledgeable fans get it right? Are the individual rosters laden with the best players, or did some deserving players get shortchanged at the expense of big names and popularity contests?

Because of space constraints, we’ll focus on just the position players on the American League roster.

Catcher: Seriously, Yankees fans should be embarrassed that they voted in backstop Jorge Posada. And the players should be asked why they picked Oakland’s Ramon Hernandez as Posada’s back-up. Posada is batting just .254 this season with 17 HRs and 50 RBIs. Big deal. Hernandez isn’t much better at .263, 10, and 35, but both these guys are going to Chicago next week in place of Anaheim’s Bengie Molina, who is batting .289, and Boston’s Jason Varitek, who through the weekend was hitting .300 with virtually identical power stats as Posada. Is it the defense? All three are throwing out potential base swipers at around 25 percent, so the advantage there is negligible. Even the Twins’ AJ Pierzynski is batting .292, but Posada’s going, um, why? And how on earth did he garner nearly two and a half times the vote totals of the second-place finisher (Varitek)? Methinks something stinks here.

First base: Nobody in his or her right mind would argue that Toronto’s Carlos Delgado doesn’t deserve to go, as his first-half numbers (.306, 28 HRs, an astounding 92 RBIs) are legit. But here comes the Yank Taint again: in second place in the fan voting, just 330,000 votes behind Delgado, was Jason Giambi, who was booed for two months by the Yankees faithful and has only recently climbed out of a low-.200 hole. Terrific, Giambi’s all the way up to .266 after a great June, but does that make him an All-Star? Hardly. Giambi has good power numbers, but through the weekend he had almost as many strikeouts (73) as hits (75). Chicago’s chronically underachieving Frank Thomas, who is on the " extra " fans’ Internet ballot this week along with Varitek, Molina, and Giambi to pick the AL’s final roster member, also has better numbers than Giambi and deserves to go. But the pinstriper fans stuffed the ballot box again with the name of an unworthy player, and will in all likelihood do so once more in this upcoming week’s ballot to get the fourth Yank on the roster.

Second base: What have we here? Another Bronx Bomber voted in. Is Alfonso Soriano deserving of his spot, won by 350,000 votes over Seattle’s Bret Boone? Let’s compare: Soriano: .296, 13 2Bs, 22 HRs, 49 RBIs, a league-leading 70 K’s; Boone: .310, 24 2Bs, 22 HRs, 70 RBIs, 60 K’s. Luckily, Boone was voted in as a reserve by the players, but he should be starting the game in place of Soriano — who should be there, but not as a starter. And Texas’s Michael Young (.315) might make a case that he should be there instead.

Shortstop: Texas’s Alex Rodriguez, as the Majors’ highest-paid player, had better be making an annual appearance at the All-Star game given his salary ($25 million), but this year his stats (.297, 21 HRs, 54 RBIs) do not give him a noticeable edge over the reserve, the Red Sox’ Nomar Garciaparra, who has torn up the league the last couple of months and is hitting .333 with 13 HRs and 57 RBIs. Yankees fans still managed to get their shortstop, Derek Jeter, into third place in the fan voting despite his so-so stats (.297, five HRs, 20 RBIs, achieved over just 49 games due to injury). Stunningly, though, it looks like Jeter will be staying home for the first time in six seasons.

Third base: Anaheim’s Troy Glaus got the fans’ nod, despite average numbers (.264, 15 HRs, 46 RBIs), and Texas’s Hank Blalock (.332, 14 HRs, 48 RBIs) was the deserving players’ choice. Tough choices to leave off: Boston’s Bill Mueller (.332, 30 doubles) and the Twins’ Corey Koskie (.300, 14 HRs, 54 RBIs). For some reason, 683,000 fans thought that Yankees third baseman Robin Ventura, batting .245, was a deserving All-Star, and that voting contingent got the 35-year-old a third-place finish in the fan voting, well ahead of Blalock and Mueller. Ridiculous.

Outfield: The fans chose three very deserving candidates to start the game: the Yankees’ Hideki Matsui (.309, nine HRs, 63 RBIs), Boston’s Manny Ramirez (.326, 20 HRs, 66 RBIs) and Ichiro Suzuki (.347, seven, 27), while the Angels’ Garret Anderson (.309, 19, 72), the Jays’ Vernon Wells (.304, 21, 80), the Orioles’ Melvin Mora (.360, 12, 43), and Detroit’s only hope, Dmitri Young (.294, 17, 47), were selected by the players. The only players with a potential beef about their non-invites are the Devil Rays’ dynamic duo of Rocco Baldelli and Aubrey Huff, both of whom are batting over .300. But these youngsters will get their chance someday.

DH: Seattle’s Edgar Martinez (.299 at age 40) is a worthy choice, and his vote total was nearly three times that of the second-place finisher (Chicago’s Carl Everett). Everett got some consolation in being picked by the players despite his reputation (in Boston) as a clubhouse troublemaker. And, proving that there are idiots everywhere, Yank Nick Johnson (406,000 votes despite being on the disabled list since mid-May) and Soxer Jeremy Giambi (his .173 average convinced 398,000 voters that he was All-Star material) finished fourth and fifth, respectively, in nationwide fan voting.

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After Friday and Saturday’s poundings of the Yankees, in which the Red Sox put 10-spots up on the board each day while muzzling the pinstripers’ vaunted offense, Sox fans had reason to believe the weekend was already a success. Then Andy Pettitte shut down the Sox in a 7-1 New York victory on Sunday, and that left just one thing missing for Boston fans: a truly demoralizing loss. They didn’t necessarily want one, but given the nature of this season thus far, it was too much to expect that Boston could go four straight games without one. Therefore, it was not surprising that the Red Sox cancelled out their heroics in the first two games of the four-game series by dropping the last two, capped by a crushing 2-1 bottom-of-the-ninth loss on Monday afternoon. What was worse, Boston squandered another Pedro start, as Martinez went seven strong innings, striking out 11, but left with another no-decision after leaving a 1-1 game. Every other member of the Sox bullpen had managed to blow at least one game in relief for Boston this season, and on Monday it was closer BK Kim’s turn, as he managed to hold New York scoreless in the eighth before giving up consecutive singles and a hit batsman with no outs in the ninth. After Ventura struck out for the fourth time in the game, Todd Walker botched a routine grounder to second, and the winning run scored. The bottom five of the Boston order went 0-for-17 on Monday against Mike Mussina.

So which Yankees team is the true one? The one that got blown out in its first two games, or the one that held the league’s top-hitting team to single runs over the last two games of the series? And which Sox team is the real deal? The one that made mincemeat out of David Wells and Roger Clemens while pounding out 25 hits and 11 homers, or the one that managed a feeble nine singles over the next two days?

Either way, this year’s Boston baseball squad is a team you can’t take your eyes off, and also a team that frequently makes itself too painful for its fans to watch.

Ladies and gentlemen: 75 games left, starting in Toronto on Tuesday, here are your Boston Red Sox, the Can’t-Look Kids.

" Sporting Eye " runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com