Aubrey Huff lashes out against All-Star game, fans

Aubrey Huff is having a pretty great first half for the Giants. He entered play Friday batting .298/.384/.556 with 17 homers and 54 RBI over 295 at-bats. Some might even say he's "All-Star worthy." In turn, Mychael Urban of CSNBayArea.com asked him if he would consider going to the game as an injury replacement. Apparently not.

"It's a sham," Huff told CSNBayArea.com by phone Friday morning from Washington, D.C. "To me, the All-Star Game is retarded."

Go ahead and call Huff inarticulate or politically incorrect if you want. That's fine. He deserves it. But believe it or not, that might not be the dumbest thing he said during this interview. He continued:

"It's so backward, it's a joke," said Huff, a 33-year-old veteran of 11 big-league seasons who has never been an All-Star. "I mean, if you want to make the game mean something and be so important with the World Series thing, why are you letting the fans pick the starters?

"If the game's that big of a deal, it should be the managers and players picking the team, because they really know who the best players are. Let the fans pick that last guy in the internet thing. That's enough. The way they have it now, though, with the fans picking the starters, it's either the most popular players or the guys on the big-market teams -- the cities with the most fans, like the Yankees and Boston and Philly -- just dominating the voting."

I'm not going to go over every starter one by one and evaluate whether they deserve to be there, because I honestly don't care. But I think we can all agree that this is probably the wrong year to make the argument that managers should have expanded authority on the complexion of the rosters.



(nbcsports.com)