The 2026 MLB All-Star Game is at Citizens Bank Park. Zack Wheeler is 9-1 with a 2.28 ERA. He won’t be on the roster. He has to watch the whole thing from his own dugout, in his own stadium, in his own city.
I’m a Red Sox fan. I have no stake in whatever happens to the Phillies. But as a baseball fan who watches this process every summer, I can say this more clearly than a Phillies fan can, without the bias discount: what MLB did to Zack Wheeler is objectively indefensible, and it exposes three separate things that are broken about how the All-Star Game works.
Let’s start with the Sunday-start rule, because that’s where the specific absurdity lives. Since 2010, MLB has barred pitchers who start the Sunday before the break from pitching in the All-Star Game, with the logic being that you can’t ask someone to pitch on Sunday and again on Tuesday. Fine. That’s defensible on its face. What’s not defensible is the application. Paul Skenes, Jacob Misiorowski, and Max Meyer all started that same Sunday. All three were still named to the NL roster and then replaced. They got the official designation, the career honor, the jersey photo op. Wheeler — who started Sunday too — got nothing. Not named. Not replaced. Zero.
Wheeler noticed. “It pisses me off. It’s kind of BS,” he said after striking out 14 Reds in 7 innings the next day, which was apparently his version of submitting an appeals brief. He went further: “It’s kind of a BS rule that just because I pitch on a certain day, I get punished for it. Just because I pitch on a certain day, I can’t pitch an All-Star Game, or even be there, or get the recognition for it.” And then the line that should follow Rob Manfred to every press conference for the rest of his tenure: “You figure they’d have a clue about it by now with how many All-Star Games they’ve had.”
Sixteen years. The rule is sixteen years old.
His agent, B.B. Abbott, was more direct, calling it “tone deaf” and adding: “Everybody knows what he’s been through. And to not do what you needed to do to let this guy be honored in his home ballpark, it’s ludicrous.” The “what he’s been through” is thoracic outlet syndrome surgery — a surgery that has shortened or ended careers at the major league level, and that Wheeler came back from to post a 3.12 FIP and a 4.90 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He’s eighth in MLB bWAR among pitchers despite starting the year behind schedule.
The Sunday-start rule isn’t the only lever that’s broken here, though. It’s just the one that caught Wheeler specifically. The second broken thing: every team must have at least one All-Star representative, a requirement that forces roster spots toward players on weak clubs at the expense of players on contenders. Five Phillies made it in 2026, but Wheeler wasn’t one of them, despite being the only one among their starters with a plausible claim to being the best pitcher in the league right now. Misiorowski, who did receive his honorary nod before being replaced, leads the majors with 167 strikeouts and a 1.62 ERA. Wheeler has 98 punchouts in 87 innings at 2.28. Both are genuinely elite. The difference in their treatment isn’t statistical; it’s procedural.
The third broken thing is the fan vote, which this year gave us Ozzie Albies as a starter and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (hitting .265 with 4 home runs) on the roster. Guerrero ranked 28th in OPS at first base. Fan voting selects for marketability, name recognition, and jersey sales. It always has, and it probably always will, because the All-Star Game is fundamentally a marketing event. But when you combine a marketability-based fan vote with a mandatory team-representation rule with an arcane Sunday pitching restriction that gets applied inconsistently depending on which pitcher your PR person lobbied for, you get exactly the outcome you deserve: the best pitcher in the host city’s rotation standing in the outfield watching batting practice on his own field.
Wheeler went out and struck out 14 Reds the day after the snub. “I feel like that was kind of a reminder,” he said, “for whoever needs to be reminded.”
MLB needed the reminder. They didn’t take it.
Zack Wheeler didn't make the All-Star game, struck out 14 batters, then immediately called out MLB.@WapnerNewman pic.twitter.com/WsJBgGkecM
— NBC Sports Philadelphia (@NBCSPhilly) July 8, 2026
Wheeler’s agent called MLB’s handling ludicrous. Wheeler himself called it BS. The only people who seem unbothered are the ones who wrote the rule in 2010 and have spent sixteen years declining to fix it. On July 14, the All-Star Game will be played at Citizens Bank Park while Zack Wheeler watches from somewhere inside the building, having gone 9-1 with a 2.28 ERA for the team that’s hosting the thing. That’s not a quirk of scheduling. That’s the system working exactly as designed, which is the real problem.