New York Yankees: Somehow, no Yankees made the early ‘All-Star Tour’ roster

Somehow, zero New York Yankees players were selected for Major League Baseball’s ‘All-Star Tour’ with the Nippon Professional Baseball league in Japan. That series will be six games played from November 8th to 15th.

The early roster for the ‘All-Star Tour’ to be played with the Nippon Professional Baseball league in Japan, was set Monday morning as eight players were named to play for that week in November but none of them are on the New York Yankees.

To the surprise of many,  no Yankees were named by Don Mattingly who will be leading the team through Japan as manager. The so-called ‘All-Star Tour’ features only three 2018 All-Stars, as well as the likely 2018 National League Rookie-of-the-Year, Ronald Acuna.

The three All-Stars named were Yadier Molina, Euginio Suarez and Christian Yelich. Three All-Stars, but not one of them started in the All-Star game yet it is called the ‘All-Star Tour’.

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Now to be fair, this is an early roster and only eight players were named with Rhys Hoskins, Carlos Santana, Whit Merrifield and Chris Taylor rounding out the roster.

However, typically in tours such as this one the first players you announce are the players there to excite the fans.

Not having any Yankees on the roster came as a major surprise to many who were looking forward to the tour.

The New York Yankees are one of the biggest draws in baseball. Simply having anyone in their uniform or somehow associated with them is incredibly marketable.

So, simply put, it came as a let down to many such as myself to advertise the tour as an ‘All-Star Tour’ and then you only throw three All-Stars on the roster of which none started.

When the tour was announced, it drew a lot of buzz as fans were excited to see the best of the best play together.

Many expected to see players like Aaron Judge, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper play together in the outfield while Clayton Kershaw took the mound with Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, Jose Altuve and Paul Goldschmidt behind him.

To be fair this is not all at the fault of the MLB, it is going to be very hard to convince players such as the ones mentioned above to take a week out of their off-season to play in Japan.

It would be even harder considering many of these players are about to enter the postseason and they would’ve just wrapped up their season in which they played for eight months straight.

There were many problems that likely went into getting players like these, but to not have one mentioned was a large disappointment.

The rest of the roster will be announced in the coming weeks and who knows, maybe some of these players will be added to the roster.

It is hard to expand baseball into global platforms, or even established ones like Japan without any New York Yankees star power.