All-Star snubs are a fact of life in baseball and every year around this time fans and media members alike work themselves into a frenzy debating why one guy should have made it and another shouldn’t. So you can imagine what a die hard Giants fan like myself was thinking when the rosters were announced and Ryan Vogelsong was nowhere to be found.

Already formulating my “here’s-why-Vogey-rules” post in my mind, I sat down to watch his start yesterday against the Reds still seething over his omission from the mid-season classic. Then it hit me like a Madison Bumgarner batting practice swing. I shouldn’t be mad that Vogelsong wasn’t recognized as he should have been. No, in fact I should be thanking the players and coaches who didn’t vote for him for further sharpening the edge with which Vogelsong pitches every time out. Then, about an hour after he’d notched his 14th quality start in 15 total starts, I saw this.

That, for those who can’t be bothered to click, is a post-game story by CSN Bay Area’s Andrew Baggarly in which Vogelsong voiced exactly why he wasn’t included in this year’s All-Star game and why we as Giants fans should be happy about it.

“People don’t take me seriously.”

Five simple words that speak volumes about a man and a pitcher that has seen the good times and the bad and has emerged as quite simply one of the best pitchers in the National League whether his peers want to acknowledge it or not. We, of course, know better.

His detractors will point to a low K-rate and a low BABIP as proof that his success over the last season and a half is unsustainable, however I would argue that we are well out of small-sample-size territory and his low line drive percentage (17%) and low HR% (1.9%) would seem to indicate that like Matt Cain, he simply has the ability to limit loud contact.

Numbers aside, perhaps no starter in baseball has more to prove on a start-to-start basis than Vogelsong and this All-Star slight, as pointed out in the Baggarly piece, will only cause the rather sizable chip on his shoulder to grow. So thanks NL players and managers, for adding fuel to Vogelsong’s fire and ensuring that complacency and satisfaction are words that will never be a part of his vocabulary. We’ll continue to take him seriously while he continues to mow you down.