Through the first half of this baseball season, no pitcher has been better than Dan Haren. Not Tim Lincecum. Not Zack Greinke. Not Johan Santana.
The rest of the Diamondbacks, however, have largely missed the boat.
So in keeping with the not-good-enough theme of the summer of ‘09, it figures that Lincecum would get the starting nod over Haren in Tuesday’s All-Star game.
Fluky that it may be, the hope here is that the primary reason behind this is because the All-Star game falls on Lincecum’s regular pitching schedule, while Haren threw more than 110 pitches in shutting down the Marlins last weekend and would throw on three days rest.
Other than that, it doesn’t add up.
Lincecum has been, well Lincecum: 10-2 with a 2.33 earned run average and a league-leading 149 strikeouts, and the Giants have been the better team this season.
But Haren leads the NL in ERA (2.04), WHIP (.808), complete games (3) and has a dizzying 8-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. Haren’s 9-5 record should be more like 11-3 or 12-2.
It’s quibbling, really, and not the type of thing that would keep Haren up late at night (he has a young child to do that).
Philadelphia/NL All-Star manager Charlie Manuel couldn’t have gone wrong (he already did that by enlisting his starting Phillies outfield), but even for something as relatively menial as throwing the first inning instead of the second inning of an All-Star game, it would have been nice to see the starting nod to the hard-luck Haren.
