Fans Are Paying Hundreds to See MLB All-Stars Who Won’t Show Up. Rosenthal Has a Take.

The MLB All-Star Game lands in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. Citizens Bank Park will host the festivities. But some of the biggest names in baseball won’t be there.

Shohei Ohtani is out. So are a handful of other stars. The Dodgers superstar has been playing through a knee issue, and the team decided the midseason break was the right time to let him rest. Fans who dropped serious money on tickets are not thrilled about it.

Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic got blunt about the situation on Foul Territory. He didn’t sugarcoat it.

“None of these reasons for players not being here are invalid. They’re frustrating, and you wish they could be, obviously, not factors in this particular conversation, but they are,” Rosenthal said. “It’s just the nature of the game. You have the game in the middle of the season, so you’re going to have players who are hurt.”

Why It Keeps Happening

This isn’t a new problem. The All-Star Game sits right in the middle of a 162-game grind. Bodies are beaten up by July. Players are tired. Some have nagging injuries they’ve been nursing for weeks. The league wants the showcase. The players want a weekend off.

Fans online have floated ideas to fix it. Withhold the All-Star bonus unless the player actually shows up. Remove the All-Star designation from their Baseball Reference page if they skip it. But Rosenthal pointed out that the Players Association would fight pretty much any penalty system hard. And they’d have a case. Forcing injured players to play in an exhibition game isn’t exactly a great look either.

Of course, there’s also the question of whether every absence is truly injury-related. Some guys might be milking it. Hard to prove either way. The league hasn’t commented on that part of the debate.

Rosenthal didn’t offer a clean solution because there probably isn’t one. You can’t move the game to the offseason without wrecking the whole calendar. You can’t force guys to play hurt. And you can’t make fans happy when the biggest draw in the sport is sitting in street clothes.

So Philadelphia gets its All-Star Game. Just not every All-Star.