He was an All-Star? MLB edition

With a career bWAR of -0.4 across only 271 games played, injuries plagued Ken Harvey's time in the majors and affected both his longevity and productivity. However, in that short stint with the Royals, Harvey was able to get an All-Star nod with a solid first-half performance (10 HR, 34 RBI, .305/.353/.452) in 2004.

One player he got selected over, for instance, was teammate Mike Sweeney, who had 16 HR and a higher OPS at the break. Most obviously snubbed, however, was White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko, who was seventh across MLB at the halfway point with 22 HR and was slashing .296/.384/.567, but had no All-Star nomination to go along with all that production. However, he'd go on to make it five times after that, making it six total in his career.

The All-Star moment you'll associate most with Inge is his performance in the 2009 Home Run Derby, when he belted a whopping grand total of... zero homers. Yikes. But he was also a part of the actual All-Star Game that year, and it's not like he didn't deserve it. He was near the top of the leaderboard at the break with 21 HR and a .515 slugging percentage, both of which were outliers compared to the rest of his career.

He was a solid player at times for Detroit, but his career .233/.301/.384 slash line doesn't exactly suggest an All-Star ceiling at any point. In fact, of all players ever named to an All-Star team, Inge is in the bottom-10 in career batting average (min. 5000 plate appearances), and he didn't exactly have the power as some of the other names in that group, like Dave Kingman, Chris Davis and Carlos Pena.

From 2001 to 2010, there were only two seasons in which the Pirates had more than one All-Star representative. One of those years was 2006, when Jason Bay and Freddie Sanchez got their rightful recognition. The other was 2009, when Freddie Sanchez reached 100 hits in the first half of the year and was joined by Zach Duke, the eventual league leader in losses (16) from the rough 2009 Pirates campaign.

At the half, he was 8-8 with a 3.29 ERA... not too bad! In the second half, he was 3-8 with a 5.17 ERA... not too good! Yovani Gallardo could have been considered, with an 8-7 record and a 3.22 ERA in the first half but with more than twice as many strikeouts. Chris Carpenter (7-3, 2.47 ERA at the break) was also a stronger candidate that season.

The Pirates had some other names who could have gone in Duke's spot, like 2011 All-Star Kevin Correia and 2013 All-Star Jeff Locke.

With a 4.52 career ERA, Hughes probably doesn't bring the term "All-Star" to mind when you recall his career. You probably don't think of the term "MLB ace" either. However, he was both.

Hughes was 5-0 after his first five starts in the 2010 season with a 1.38 ERA, so it's no wonder that his name was in the mix for All-Star recognition. He went 6-2 over his next 10 starts, too, giving him an amazing 11-2 record in the first half. However, he recorded a 5.08 ERA over that stretch, which was a sign of things to come. With a 4.90 ERA in the second half, Hughes finished with an 18-8 record but a 4.19 ERA to show for it, which is more of a testament to the Yankees' explosive, league-leading run production than anything else.

Following a rough 4-14, 5.19 ERA season in 2013, Hughes was signed by the Twins as a free agent and... became their ace. And he actually had his strongest season, too, going 16-10 with a 3.52 ERA, made even more impressive by his 2.65 FIP (fielding-independent pitching) which was a top-10 figure in baseball.

So, some good years? Sure. An All-Star pitcher? That's not exactly what Hughes seems to have been.

This is what happens when you're a 29-59 team at the halfway mark, you know? Someone had to be the guy for the Orioles, and that guy was Wigginton, the veteran playing for his then-fifth team. He'd wind up playing for the Rockies, Phillies and Cardinals over the next three seasons.

At the half, Wigginton was slashing .252/.334/.434 with some solid pop — 14 HR and 45 RBI — but he would wind up seeing all three of those figures go down to .248/.312/.415 by the end of the season. Those are all pretty close to Wigginton's career averages, showing you why he's an inclusion on the list. Those certainly don't scream "All-Star" to me.

I'm going to show you two statlines here:
1. 7-0, 2.10 ERA, .188 BAA
2. 6-8, 4.83 ERA, .272 BAA

Would you believe those are the two stretches that made up Ogando's 2011 season? Though not exactly split into the first and second half of the year, the first stat line is what Ogando did in his first dozen appearances of 2011, whereas the second is what he did over the remaining 19. That's quite the drop-off, eh?

Ogando would stick around Texas for a few more years, though he flipped between the starting rotation and the bullpen and never quite found the stuff that set him off to such a good start in 2011. His last appearance was in 2018 with the Indians, when he pitched a single inning and gave up two hits, three walks and two earned runs.

In LaHair's final year in which he saw MLB action, he was an All-Star and he was 29 years old. It's unusual for a player's big league story to end there, and not be followed by some career-ending injury, but that's the way it went with LaHair, largely due to the emergence of Anthony Rizzo. It was also due to his second-half performance, but first let's recap what made him an All-Star.

How about a first half with 14 HR and a .286/.364/.519 slash line? That's certainly All-Star worthy, and he was one of two Cubs (along with Starlin Castro) to make the squad in 2012. But the second half... yeesh. How about two HR and a .202/.269/.303 slash line? That helps to explain why that season was ultimately the last that LaHair would play in the bigs. He continued his career in an assortment of minor, independent and international leagues.

What a tough era of Phillies history this was. The post-World Series letdown was a big one, even after a few more years of regular season success, and the years from 2013 to 2017 all kind of blend together into one big pile of... bleh.

For a brief time, it looked like Dom Brown could be the bright spark this team needed for the next wave of success. After all, he had 18 home runs and a very impressive .915 OPS a whole 60 games into the year, and despite a little slump before the break, his first half was certainly worthy of an All-Star nod. Only seven guys in the league had more home runs than his 23 when the Midsummer Classic came around.

In the second half, he hit four. That's all. He'd hit 15 more in his career with the Phillies and in the majors as a whole, and he played his final game at age 27 in 2015. With a 0.7 career bWAR, Brown's 2013 first half was a very strange anomaly.

Marco Scutaro... postseason hero, solid slap hitter, reliable and versatile infielder. That all checks out. All-Star? That isn't something I think of when I hear the 13-year journeyman's name.

Interestingly enough, that honor did come for Scutaro, and it came in his second-to-last season at age 37. Perhaps he was still riding the high of his 2012 playoff performance, one that included the NLCS MVP Award, as he kept on hitting right into 2013. He recorded 101 hits in the first half, slashing .316/.367/.400, and was likely the beneficiary of manager Bruce Bochy leading the National League squad that year. Along with Scutaro, Bochy had Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner on board for the festivities.

Now a utility man with the Houston Astros, Diaz got his big league career off to a pretty hot start. Entering the league as a 25-year-old rookie in 2016, Diaz slashed .315/.380/.536 in the first half with 13 HR and 48 RBI, including an unbelievable month of April in which he slashed .423/.453/.732. You really can't get kick off a career better than that, and All-Star honors seemed right.

Now, though, the fact of the matter is that no one thinks of Diaz as an everyday starter on a contender, much less an All-Star. If there's a way he can regain the magic that carried him throughout the first half of his rookie year, he hasn't found it yet.