Bob Cook

Tampa Bay reaching first place after 10 years of barely seeing anything but the bottom of the AL East was one sign. Another was no one laughing whenever someone says the Chicago Cubs are ready to win their first World Series in 100 years. Now the All-Star Game roster confirms it -- this is baseball’s year of the has-been and never-were.

Both the National League and American Leagues rosters have more candidates for Comeback Player of the Year than they do MVP. Either the AL or NL could leave their clubhouse with this paraphrase of the words Merle Webb delivered before Hickory won the Indiana high school basketball title in Hoosiers: “Let’s win this one for all the small-time players who never had a chance to get here.”

Ryan Ludwick could deliver this mini-speech for the NL.

The soon-to-turn-30-year-old outfielder on May 31, 2005, was sent down to Triple-A by Cleveland after Juan Gonzalez was taken off the disabled list -- and didn’t come back up even though Gonzalez blew out his hamstring in his first at-bat and was out the rest of the season. After sticking with the Cardinals after being promoted last year, Ludwick finally cemented his place after beating out a veteran outfielder St. Louis wanted to try out -- Juan Gonzalez.

Who knew that would lead to Ludwick becoming one of the premier power hitters in the NL this season? He’s been the biggest Ludwick-related thing to happen in St. Louis since his brother Eric was part of the trade that acquired Mark McGwire.

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Of course, the most obvious sign the baseball gods have decided to smile on some of its struggling souls is Texas’ Josh Hamilton, who could become the first to win the Comeback and MVP awards in the same year. It was a nice little story when he played 90 decent games for Cincinnati last year after a long recovery from cocaine and alcohol addiction. Now it’s an amazing story that this year he’s become his league’s best offensive player and the fans’ choice to start in the outfield.

Or how about Cleveland’s Cliff Lee and Los Angeles’ Ervin Santana, either of whom would be a legitimate AL starting pitcher? They were one-time phenoms who fell so far last year, they fell out of the major leagues. Santana stayed with the parent club this year in part because of injuries to John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar, which also allowed a pitcher who hadn’t yet been able to stick in the majors to finally get his shot -- fellow Angels All-Star Joe Saunders.

These reversals of fortune are good for baseball, in the sense that no one is suspicious that artificial enhancement created these out-of-nowhere performances. On the flip side, that one is suspicious that this might have been what baseball would look like if artificial enhancement hadn’t created previous out-of-nowhere performances.

They are also good in that fans, even in Pittsburgh and Kansas City, can hope a seemingly minor acquisition like Carlos Quentin, dumped by the Diamondbacks to the White Sox after his oft-injured self couldn’t fit into the Arizona outfield, can suddenly turn into a cog of the franchise. Then again, general managers might not like the sudden expectation that every piece of coal they find is supposed to shine on the diamond.

No matter. The fun of this year’s All-Star Game is not watching Ichiro Suzuki patrol the outfield one more time (unless you’re a Mariners fan looking desperately for something to hold onto). It will be rooting for the hard cases that struggled to make it.

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