As I wrote yesterday, I love All-Star balloting. Its very idiosyncrasies and inequities are, to me, a great part of its appeal. I fill out one ballot per year – this year’s was punched on Memorial Day while enjoying a frosty beverage at the ballpark. With more than a third of the season behind us, here is how I filled out the American League side of the ballot; check yesterday’s paper to see how I sized up the senior circuit.

C Ivan Rodriguez
Detroit Tigers
.295 AVG/.304 OBA/.469 SLG

Pretty much all the best catchers in the game play in the American League. Jason Varitek is the captain of the defending world champion Red Sox,an excellent defensive player whose .318/.386/.568 batting line would make him a worthy All-Star as a first baseman. The Yankees’ Jorge Posada, in a down year, is playing with his usual toughness while putting up numbers that would mark a career year for most backstops. Minnesota’s Joe Mauer, at 22, may already be the best all-around player at the position, and is clearly the next great catcher in the game.

For all that, Rodriguez deserves yet another start behind the plate. The best catcher since Johnny Bench and one of the five best to ever play, he’s not what he once was, but he remains a strong hitter and a good fielder. It’s impossible even to tell what his greatest accomplishment is. Leading the 2003 Marlins to a World Series win? Joining a Tigers team that was arguably the worst ever and leading it back to respectability? Spending an entire decade as the game’s dominant defensive player? You can’t go wrong with any of these. Pudge is a living legend.

1B Mark Teixeira
Texas Rangers
.297/.358/.552

Baseball moves in cycles. A few years ago, with Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado, Jim Thome, Rafael Palmeiro, and Mike Sweeney all in their primes, a batting line like Teixeira’s wouldn’t even have earned him a spot on the All-Star roster. Today, he’s pretty clearly the best in the league at the position, even taking into account the boost his numbers get from a hitter-friendly home park. This is no slight to Teixeira, a fine young hitter who has an excellent shot at winning an MVP award in the next five years; baseball is just an odd game sometimes.

2B Brian Roberts
Baltimore Orioles
.366/.447/.639

The choice here comes down to two players. The first is Alfonso Soriano, an excellent player whose flaws are so irritating that people often forget just how good he is – 40 home runs, 40 doubles, and a .300 average can make up for an awful lot of bad defense and undisciplined at-bats. The second is Roberts, a heretofore solid player who’s hitting like Rogers Hornsby and has shocked the baseball world by driving his team to the top of the game’s toughest division.

I had to go with Roberts. Soriano is a better player and will probably end the year with superior numbers, but Roberts has not only been the top player in the game thus far in 2005, he’s also made his mark on the pennant race. Fluke or not, he deserves the start.

3B Alex Rodriguez
New York Yankees
317/.430/.611

I’m convinced that even if Rodriguez could single-handedly cover the left side of the infield on defense while hitting .400, people would still come up with reasons why Derek Jeter is better. But comparing the two is a joke.

Rodriguez hit more home runs from 2001-03 than Jeter has in his career. He’s a better defensive player. He has much better postseason numbers – his slugging average in October is about 100 points higher than Jeter’s. He’s even stolen more bases than Jeter has over the course of their careers. Even giving Jeter all the credit he deserves for intangibles, Rodriguez could be Ty Cobb off the field – which he isn’t – and he’d still be doing more to help the Yanks win.

None of this has anything to do with why he should make the All-Star team, but that’s obvious: With the possible exception of Miguel Tejada, Rodriguez is the best all-around player in the league. If you think the Yankees are having a bad season, consider that if they still had Aaron Boone rather than A-Rod at the hot corner, they’d probably be 10 games under .500 right now.

SS Miguel Tejada
Baltimore Orioles
329/.375/.633

It’s pretty rare for a ballplayer to win an MVP award, then go on to vastly improve his game, but that’s what Tejada has done. Last year, he set new career highs in batting, on-base, and slugging averages, drove in 150 runs, deserved to win the Gold Glove, played every single game, and was by all accounts a leader and a positive presence on a Baltimore club that had been mired in mediocrity for years.

This year, he’s gotten even better, upping his slugging average by a staggering 100 points. Tejada is a great player, and the fact that after all the hype surrounding Rodriguez, Jeter, and Nomar Garciaparra in the 1990s, Tejada has ended up as the best shortstop in the game – by far – shows just how unpredictable baseball can be.

RF Ichiro Suzuki
Seattle Mariners
.309/.359/.430

You can definitely make an argument for the great Gary Sheffield here – he’s having the best season among AL right fielders. Certainly, there’s another argument to be made for Vladimir Guerrero, whether or not he happens to have missed a few weeks with injury. But in a game that’s still far too dominated by power to suit my taste, I’ll go with the man who plays the game the way it was played before Babe Ruth came along.

Ichiro is the most exciting player in baseball. He’s a unique hitter of historic stature, a great defender, and a reminder of a time when speed and grace were as important as power. He’s also the living embodiment of the game’s diversity and its future, and probably the most consistently articulate and thoughtful interview among active players. I think it’s fair to say he’s an All-Star.

One of the most comical things about the 2004 season was the grumbling in some quarters that Ichiro’s quest for the single-season hits record betrayed his weakness as a player, which is supposedly that he doesn’t walk enough. Leaving aside the fact that career .340 hitters don’t really need to walk all that much, the man had a .414 OBA in a pitcher’s park last year. Last week’s “Sports Weekly” had a very good article on Ichiro by Steve DiMeglio in which he addressed the issue pretty directly.

“I heard the advice that I should walk more when I was in Japan, and I’m starting to hear it more here. That advice is very naive,” he said, and he then followed on with a discourse on his philosophy of hitting that is well worth your time. Here’s hoping he hits .400 next year.

CF Carl Crawford
Tampa Bay Devil Rays
.275/.309/.417

Some among you will note that Crawford does not actually play center field. My response is that my All-Star ballot must transcend the truly awesome stupidity of the Devil Rays. Crawford actually is a center fielder, and a good one, but the Devil Rays play him in left because they have an even better one in Rocco Baldelli … who has been out with an injury all year, leaving the center field job to Alex Sanchez, a scrub best known for being the first player to test positive for steroids.

Crawford isn’t having a great season, but last year, at 22, he hit .296 with 56 extra-base hits and 59 steals. He gets my vote because he’s an incredibly exciting future superstar, and in a time when the American League doesn’t have any great center fielders, I’d just rather give my vote to someone who will someday become one than to someone like Johnny Damon, a solid player having a nice season.

LF Manny Ramirez
Boston Red Sox
.254/.345/.478

Here’s a prime example of why I vote for star players even when they’re having bad seasons, rather than whoever happens to be hitting well through the first two months of the year. The Rangers’ Kevin Mench is having a much better season than Ramirez, hitting .295/.356/.578. Does anyone really care?

Ramirez, in the first down year of his entire career – his lowest batting average since he became a regular was .294, and he’s hit more than 30 home runs in nine of the last 10 seasons – has still been as valuable as any American League left fielder aside from Mench. His inclusion on the roster also allows for the possibility of him throwing to the wrong base, forgetting how many outs there are, or hitting the ball about 500 feet, all of which are, in addition to his greatness, good reasons to vote for him.

DESIGNATED HITTER: None. Designated hitter is not a position, as DHs don’t play the field. I registered my protest against this non-position by non-voting.