Kansas City Royals fans are at it again. Early voting for the All-Star game was revealed this week and just like last year royal blue, white, and powder blue dot both the infield and the outfield for the junior circuit. With twenty-five ballots for each fan, Royals fanatics have elevated one of their own to either first or second in the voting for every position on the diamond. While Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain are deserving of the all-star nod, the specter of a .246/.287/.331 lightweight at 2B looms over the all-star game in the person of Omar Infante, much as it did up until the last moment last year.

Who Should Be the AL 2B All-Star?

Jose Altuve, the extraordinary 2B for the Houston Astros, currently leads the voting, as he probably should. After all he is hitting .330/.407/.558 with 15 SB and a surprising 9 HR. And if fantasy baseball is your thing, Altuve is second on the player rater at ESPN behind only Clayton Kershaw, super-pitcher for the ages of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, Altuve would be fine, but where are Seattle Mariners’ fans with their Robinson Cano love?

Through the first game of the San Diego Padres road series, Cano is hitting .289/.349/.588 with 16 HR and 48 RBI.  Through 52 games, Cano has accumulated 2.5 WAR as measured by FanGraphs and 2.7 WAR as measured by Baseball Reference. Either metric puts Cano on an all-star pace of 6+ WAR for the season.

Power v. Speed

Ultimately, a preference for Altuve or Cano can be distilled down to a debate over whether you want power or speed in the middle infield. Altuve has 15 SB while Cano has none. Since Altuve became the everyday 2B for the Astros in 2012, he has stolen 33, 35, 56, and 38 bases respectively. Cano, on the other hand, only has one season in double digits – exactly 10 in 2014, his first season with the Mariners.

Cano is on pace to hit over 50 HR this season, if you’re a believer in just multiplying a stat accumulated in one set of games over the course of the entire season. I’m not. But, let’s just say he’s going to hit a bunch of HR. With double digit HR in every season since 2005, six 20+ HR seasons, and a high in 2013 of 33 HR (his free agency year), Cano has been synonymous with power in the middle infield for over a decade.

In contrast, Altuve first cracked double digit HR last season at age 25 with a modest 15. But are the 9 HR so far this season harbingers of a 20+ HR season? Maybe.

An outdated adage held that doubles turned into homers as a player matured and Altuve has had 40+ doubles for the last two seasons. Of course he has 20 so far this year, an even greater doubles pace than in the past. But there are plenty of reasons to believe Altuve is growing into some decent power as he nears that magical age 27 (another old adage that has been mostly debunked).

His ISO (isolated power), a measure that subtracts BA from SLG in order to isolate raw power, has improved since 2013 from .080 to .112 to .146 to .228 so far this season.  Cano still wins the ISO war, but it’s getting closer.

Do All-Star Voters Care About Defense?

If you can’t decide between power and speed to make your selection for the AL all-star at 2B, then should defense be the tie breaker? Maybe, maybe not.

Dustin Pedroia of scrappiness fame for the Boston Red Sox leads the American League in the middle of the diamond with a UZR/150, an advanced defensive metric normalized for 150 games, with 22.3, a full third again better than Jason Kipnis of the Cleveland Indians. Pedroia should probably also be in the conversation for all-star based on his offense with a .316/.375/.491 slash line.

But between just Altuve, Cano, and that KC 2B getting a bunch of votes currently, Altuve comes in third in the AL in UZR/150 at 13.4, Infante is fourth at 8.9, and Cano is fifth at -1.9.

Selecting All-Stars is Hard

There’s no doubt about it, selecting all-stars is hard. What isn’t hard, though, is to conclude that ballot stuffing in between meals of Kansas City BBQ isn’t going to result in the best second baseman representing the American League in San Diego on July 12^th.

Whether you’re a fan of speed or power (or even defense), get out there and vote – MLB All-Star Ballot.