PHILADELPHIA – The two players listed at the top of each league’s designated hitter slot on the 2026 All-Star rosters represent different kinds of absence. Yordan Alvarez is in the lineup. Shohei Ohtani is not.
Ohtani was named to the National League roster as the Dodgers’ designated hitter, but he will not play Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park. Knee treatment has kept him out of All-Star Weekend entirely. Aaron Judge, who would have been the American League’s most recognizable position player, is also unavailable, as is Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Together, the three form a void at the center of the 96th Midsummer Classic – a game that will proceed without the players whose names carry the most weight in the sport’s first-half narrative.
The game starts at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday at Citizens Bank Park, with pregame coverage beginning at 7 p.m. ET and streaming available on Peacock alongside the FOX broadcast. It is baseball’s showcase for what the first half produced, arriving this year in a city that has waited decades for the Midsummer Classic to return to Philadelphia. The city gets it this week without the three players it might reasonably have expected to see.
Cristopher Sánchez gets the National League start at the home of his own team, the Philadelphia Phillies. He is here in part because Zack Wheeler, the Phillies’ ace and the most natural choice to pitch in front of his own city, declined his All-Star invitation after learning he had been selected as a replacement rather than through the initial balloting process. Wheeler called the selection disrespectful and removed himself from consideration. The sequence left the NL start to Sánchez, who takes the ball in front of Philadelphia’s crowd knowing what the pregame conversation has been and what role he is now filling by default, according to Fox Sports.
Opposing him is Dylan Cease, who will start for the American League. Cease worked through the first half as one of the Blue Jays’ most reliable starters, and he faces an NL lineup without its top three offensive draws. The AL side has its own subtractions. The team’s two most prominent first-half sluggers – Judge and Guerrero – will not contribute to whatever Cease builds in the early innings.
The AL lineup behind Cease includes Bobby Witt Jr. at shortstop for the Royals, a player who has shouldered Kansas City’s offensive burden through a stretch where the roster around him has been tested. Witt’s selection reflects what the first half required of him individually, even as the Royals absorbed injuries that complicated their AL Central standing. Ernie Clement starts at second base after a first half that included a clutch performance in the Blue Jays’ run against Baltimore in June. Mike Trout starts in left field for the Angels. Cody Bellinger starts in center for the Yankees. Yordan Alvarez holds the DH slot, the position that on the NL side carries Ohtani’s name without Ohtani standing in it.
The NL lineup is built around different names. Freddie Freeman starts at first base for the Dodgers, arriving at All-Star Week with Los Angeles having constructed the league’s deepest roster around a player who has not missed a significant stretch of games. CJ Abrams starts at shortstop for the Washington Nationals. Juan Soto is in the outfield for the Mets, a team that arrived at the break at 40 wins and 57 losses – their worst first half since 1995. Soto’s selection is one of the cleaner individual performances the All-Star voting process can identify, separated from the team record that surrounds him.
The local story belongs to Kevin McGonigle, a Tigers infielder and Philadelphia native who is playing in his hometown’s All-Star Game as a first-year professional. The details of his first-half work earned him a selection that intersects with geography in a way the city’s crowd will recognize. Playing at Citizens Bank Park for the Midsummer Classic is what happens when individual performance aligns with the accident of where a player grew up.
Trout’s presence in the starting lineup represents a different kind of milestone – a player who has spent the past several seasons managing what health allows him to do, starting at baseball’s midseason showcase as one of the AL’s clearest remaining arguments that the game’s familiar names can still hold the center of a display that keeps losing them to the injured list. His start on Tuesday night carries that context alongside whatever the box score will eventually say about the game itself.
Ohtani’s knee treatment has not been described publicly in clinical detail by the Dodgers beyond confirming it has kept him from participating. Judge’s situation carries no confirmed return timeline. Guerrero’s absence reduces what would have been a genuinely difficult AL voting process to a lineup shaped by who remained available. What those three players are doing on Tuesday night, while Citizens Bank Park runs through its baseball program, is not something the box score will record.
That is the frame for the 96th All-Star Game. Sánchez takes the ball in Philadelphia with Wheeler’s refusal as the local backstory and the NL start as the result. Cease faces him from the AL side. The lineups include Witt and Freeman and Soto and Trout – enough talent to produce the kind of game that the format usually generates, full of pitching changes and late-inning leverage and individual moments that carry no playoff weight but still hold the crowd for three hours. What the second half holds for Judge and Ohtani and Guerrero is the part of Tuesday night that won’t be resolved inside Citizens Bank Park, according to NBC Sports. Their return schedules will become the more consequential baseball story once the All-Star Game ends and the second half begins.
