A's Brent Rooker, All Star
Brent Rooker was a waiver claim by the Oakland A's in the off-season, and now he will be representing them at the All Star Game in Seattle. He is the first A's outfielder selected to represent Oakland since Yoenis Céspedes in 2014.
The A's claimed the 28-year-old Rooker off waivers from the Kansas City Royals in the middle of November and gave him a shot to make the Opening Day roster. Before that, he'd been traded by the team that drafted him in the Minnesota Twins as part of the Chris Paddack/Taylor Rogers move, then was designated for assignment by the team that traded for him less than a year later. He landed with Kansas City at the beginning of August through the end of the 2022 campaign but made his way back to the waiver wire amid off-season moves, which is where he landed his opportunity in Oakland.
He took the opportunity the A's presented him during spring training and ran with it, batting .308 with a .471 on-base percentage (OBP) and 11 walks in 51 plate appearances. Being a right-handed stick, he made the roster as a platoon option to pair with lefty Seth Brown, who landed on the IL on April 10.
Rooker had only accumulated nine at-bats in the regular season before Brown's oblique injury, collecting just one hit in the small sample, but he was also showing up at the top of the hard hit percentage leaderboards, so it wasn't a huge surprise that when he got the opportunity for regular playing time that he began mashing.
A scorching-hot month of April where he hit .358 with a .471 OBP, nine homers, 22 runs batted in, and 1.5 wins above replacement is what earned him his first All Star selection, because for the first month of the season, he was arguably the best hitter in baseball.
He capped off the month of April with Player of the Week honors after hitting .417 with five homers from the 24th-30th. Rooker is still a top-30 hitter in baseball with a 131 wRC+, which also ranks 11th in the American League. Teammate Ryan Noda is right there with him, and could get a nod to the Midsummer Classic as replacement players are named.
The A's All Star said postgame, "I had long believed that I was good enough to be a big-leaguer, and to be a consistent big-leaguer. I never allowed myself to think that I could make an All Star team, so this is even shocking for me. It's more than I expected, even of myself, which is kind of a cool feeling. To go out and achieve something that I didn't even really consider to be possible until right now.
Here is the moment that Brent Rooker found out that he'd be headed to Seattle.
When asked who he wants to talk to at the All Star Game, the A's All Star told reporters that the answer is Shohei Ohtani. "There's a really cool picture of me hitting a homer off Shohei in Anaheim, and I'm gonna approach him very humbly and try to get him to sign it. I think that is something I'd like to have forever." He also said that Ohtani is easily the best baseball player of all-time.