Four takeaways from the 2024 MLB All-Star Game

Major League Baseball held its 94th All-Star Game on Tuesday night in Texas, the first to be hosted by the Rangers since 1995. That particular Midsummer Classic featured some of the most dangerous hitters of the ‘90s, like Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken Jr., and Mike Piazza. The MVP, however, turned out to be little-known Marlins outfielder Jeff Conine, who hit the go-ahead homer in the eighth.

The All-Star Game has a funny way of churning out stories like that. Last year’s MVP, Rockies catcher Elias Díaz, can also attest to this. Indeed, the player who struck the decisive blow in the loaded 2024 edition would have been few folks’ first guess — outside of New England, anyway. It’s hard to beat the near-total anonymity of a Marlin or a Rockie in the grand scheme of things, but before Tuesday, the sport’s eyes were not exactly laser-focused on Jarren Duran.

These were the stories of the 2024 MLB All-Star Game, which saw Duran take home the MVP.

Jarren Duran demands your attention

Here’s a fun fact: Only four position players in the entire American League tallied more FanGraphs WAR in the first half than Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran, who leads the AL in doubles (27) and triples (10) while batting .284/.342/.477 in 95 games. The quartet ahead of Duran—Aaron Judge, Gunnar Henderson, Bobby Witt Jr., and Juan Soto—all easily tallied over a million All-Star votes to advance past Phase 1. So did Steven Kwan, who was tied with Duran at 3.7 WAR.

Duran, however, wasn’t even close to advancing. He was all the way down at 16th.

With all due respect to the AL Central-leading Guardians, I could not pick out Will Brennan or Tyler Freeman in a line of 100 people if you gave me 98 guesses. Yet even they accumulated more votes than Duran. This was perhaps a halo effect from Cleveland fans also showing out for the deserving Kwan, but this shouldn’t have happened to Duran, a talented player who happens to don for one of baseball’s most famous uniforms on a regular basis.

So the first-time All-Star had to make the team as a reserve. For their credit, Duran’s fellow players recognized his talent by voting him onto the AL squad themselves. It took until the fifth inning for Duran to get his opportunity, when skipper Bruce Bochy put him in center to relieve Judge. With two outs and Anthony Santander on first base, Duran took a strike from Hunter Greene. The Reds righty then left a splitter in the middle of the zone, and Duran didn’t miss it.

Per MLB’s Sarah Langs, Duran joined Boston icon David Ortiz and J.D. Drew—the last Red Sox player to win All-Star Game MVP—as the only BoSox to go yard in their All-Star debut. He also gave the AL a 5-3 lead that it would not relinquish. Duran subsequently joined Drew, Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens, and Carl Yastrzemski in taking home this edition’s All-Star Game MVP; it should not be forgotten that honor is formally named the “Ted Williams All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award.”

Perhaps this is the spotlight that Duran needed to make his name known on the national stage. At the very least, if he’s hitting like this again at this point next year, he’ll do far better than 16th in the voting!

There’s a reason why Shohei Ohtani was guaranteed $700M

Fine, fine; if we want to be technical, the actual value of the heavily-deferred Ohtani deal is somewhere in the vicinity of $462 million. But it’s not exactly chump change, and even with his immense fame and talent, there were concerns about guaranteeing that much money to someone who could only DH in Year 1, as Ohtani’s second major elbow surgery last September put the star’s pitching career on hold until at least 2025.

So 2024 has been exclusively about hitting for Ohtani, and the results thus far probably have MLB pitchers hoping that his attention is diverted again as soon as possible. In 94 games for the Dodgers, he’s hit .316/.400/.635 with 29 homers and an NL-best 1.036 OPS. (Then again, he had a 1.066 OPS last year while being a two-way player, so maybe all hope is lost.)

Ohtani delivered the Senior Circuit’s only All-Star Game scoring when he stepped up to bat against Boston’s Tanner Houck. Like Duran, Ohtani got a fat splitter that was begging to be obliterated. The magnanimous DH obliged:

Four hundred feet later, the NL had a 3-0 lead. The man is something else.

We would be remiss if we failed to point out that even gods can be humbled. Flamethrower Mason Miller has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise somber final season of Oakland A’s baseball. He was their lone rep named to the AL team, but he lifted Oakland up one last time in the All-Star spotlight by hitting 103 mph while striking out Ohtani and Trea Turner in a perfect fifth.

Because Duran went yard in the next half-inning, Miller was ultimately credited with the win. Long live the Oakland Athletics.

We got Paul Skenes vs. Aaron Judge

It’s hard to believe that it was just over 365 days ago that Paul Skenes was chosen by the Pirates as the No. 1 overall pick of the MLB Draft. Although Pittsburgh took it easy with him in the second half of 2023, they only made him start seven games for Triple-A Indianapolis this year before calling him up to The Show on May 11th. There were high hopes for Skenes, but few expected him to blitz through his competition with such dominance through his first 11 big-league starts. The righty essentially forced himself into the All-Star conversation with a 1.90 ERA, 0.92 WHIP, and 12.1 K/9 in 66.1 innings, not to mention a pair of no-hit bids that only ended due to the Pirates’ pitch count restrictions.

It became a no-brainer for the National League to not only name Skenes to the All-Star team, but also to have him start the dang thing. He was just the fifth rookie in MLB history to start the Midsummer Classic, joining first-year wunderkinds like Fernando Valenzuela and Hideo Nomo. With the way that American League manager Bruce Bochy arranged his lineup though, it was unclear if fans would get the opportunity to watch Skenes go toe-to-toe with Judge, the game’s most intimidating masher.

The Yankees’ captain was batting cleanup, so Skenes was only guaranteed to face the first three AL hitters. The third, however, was Soto, Judge’s fellow superstar in New York. During the FOX pregame show, Soto guaranteed that we would get the Skenes vs. Judge showdown.

Given that Soto’s .985 OPS is topped in MLB by only Judge and Ohtani, the odds were good that he would be a man of his word. The former Nationals World Series hero also leads MLB with 79 walks, and sure enough, he stepped up with two outs and battled Skenes for seven pitches before earning an elusive free pass off the up-and-comer.

Soto later admitted that he was actually trying to take Skenes deep, but settled for the walk. Was it all a little anticlimactic because Judge immediately grounded into a force out on the first pitch he saw against Skenes? Yes. But we appreciate Soto (and Skenes’) efforts.

The baseball gods seemed to appreciate Soto as well, as his third-inning grounder got through the infield and went for a hustle double that helped the AL tie the game up at 3-3 after Ohtani’s homer. Soto’s two-bagger plated both Marcus Semien and Steven Kwan, and Soto himself scored when Kwan’s underrated teammate in Cleveland, David Fry, smacked a two-out single off Logan Webb.

Did you know that this All-Star Game was in Texas?

Little-known fact about this year’s Midsummer Classic: It took place in Arlington.

According to my expert sources, “Arlington is a city in Texas, west of Dallas.”

Like, they really, really wanted you to know that it was in Texas.

They even went out of their way to feature lassoing as the All-Star starters stepped onto the field during the pregame intros, and cowboy hats for the kids who got to be on the field with each starter.

Good thing that it didn’t feel demeaning at all for some Texans to see the sports world once again make generalizations!

If MLB is going this over-the-top for Texas, then we better get whacked over the head 10,000 times with Outkast and ATLien references at next year’s All-Star Game in Atlanta. Host the MLB Draft at Magic City. Let the Coca-Cola Bear throw out the first pitch. It’s probably what we all deserve.