The roughest start of Manny Machado’s career apparently hasn’t deterred fans from supporting the Orioles third baseman.
Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that the 24-year-old is leading American League third basemen in All-Star Game voting despite a .210 batting average entering the final day of May. Currently holding 369,069 votes, Machado owns a slight edge over Minnesota’s Miguel Sano (363,607) while Cleveland’s Jose Ramirez is in third place with 351,814 votes.
Machado leads the slumping Orioles in runs batted in (25) and is tied for the club lead in home runs (10) with Chris Davis, but his .708 on-base plus slugging percentage is nearly 100 OPS points below his career mark (.803). A .223 batting average on balls in play coupled with the sixth-best average exit velocity in the majors would indicate that Machado has experienced a great deal of bad luck so far in 2017, but he is striking out a career-high 21.5 percent of the time and is sporting the lowest line-drive percentage of his career.
A major root of the struggles has been Machado’s difficulty against fastballs. Entering 2017, the young infielder held a career .319 average and .587 slugging percentage against four-seam fastballs, but he is batting just .129 with a .242 slugging percentage against that pitch this season, according to Brooks Baseball data. Sliders have also given Machado more dramatic problems than in the past.
No other Orioles were leading their respective positions in Wednesday’s All-Star voting update, but Welington Castillo ranks second behind Kansas City’s Salvador Perez among AL catchers, Jonathan Schoop is fifth in AL second baseman voting, and Adam Jones ranks seventh among AL outfielders.
The 2017 All-Star Game will be played at Marlins Park in Miami on July 11.
Close races highlight the first American League balloting update for the 2017 @AllStarGame. Vote now at https://t.co/qd5OOxn7ED pic.twitter.com/caEZwC3uxh
— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) May 31, 2017
