An All-Star game without Yankees? It wouldn’t be the first.

Despite a rough patch where some fans have questioned the team’s relative lack of off-season trades, the Yankees have had a pretty good year. It’s eight games over .500; through Monday, they lined up for a wild card spot in the postseason. If a few injured players come back strong, the Yankees will be considered a serious contender in the playoffs.

That said, the confluence of a bad year for a few stars and the aforementioned injuries could lead to an event that’s almost impossible to imagine: This season’s All-Star Game box score may not include a Yankees player.

There will be some Yankees at the game, of course. Every team is guaranteed to have at least one player on the All-Star roster, and the Yankees are likely to have at least two. Aaron Judge, the team’s alien outfielder, will likely be chosen as the starter, despite being out indefinitely with a toe injury. And it’s a safe bet that pitcher Gerrit Cole, the team’s asset, will also be included in the squad.

Cole, who is 8-1 with a 2.78 ERA, is the team’s best option to get into the game. The Yankees’ rotation currently allows him to go into intermission with plenty of rest, and he should be one of the best options to start for the American League. But rest is a tricky thing with starting pitchers. If Cole can’t get enough rest days before the game, or if the AL manager, Dusty Baker of the Houston Astros, chooses to keep him in reserve, he gets to watch the entire game.

There’s a precedent for that. Cole has been selected to an All-Star team five times — once with the Pirates, twice with the Astros, and twice with the Yankees — but he only appeared in the game once, throwing a scoreless inning in 2015.

Outside of Cole, no other Yankee looks like a slot to make the roster. Clay Holmes’ closing numbers are good but not great. Michael King, a top reliever, has been having a rough time lately. First baseman Anthony Rizzo has a lot of competition. So there is a possibility that the Yankees will not allow any player to participate in the game, which will be held in Seattle on July 11.

A box-score shutout would be quite an accomplishment: It hasn’t happened to the Yankees since 1991, when Scott Sanderson was the team’s lone representative at the Toronto game and didn’t pitch. In all, at least one Yankees player has appeared in 90 of the 92 All-Star Games.

Sanderson, who joined the Yankees for the 1991 season, was a bright spot in an awful stretch that saw the team finish with a losing record in four consecutive seasons. He was 9-3 on the 1991 All-Star break, but resting only a few days after his last first-half start, he did not get into the game because the AL manager, Tony La Russa of the A’s, was there four used starters (Jack Morris, Jimmy Key, Roger Clemens and Jack McDowell) and three relievers (Jeff Reardon, Rick Aguilera and Dennis Eckersley).

Sanderson’s inability to pitch in his only All-Star Game was an embarrassment to a veteran pitcher who had arguably his most impressive season.

“He gave us a quality effort almost every time,” Yankees manager Stump Merrill said of Sanderson at the end of a season in which he won 16 games for a team with 91 losses. “I hope the young guys on this team pay attention when he was on the mound. They could have learned a lot from it.”

The only other time the Yankees were excluded from an All-Star Game box score was in 1943, and that time it was about proving a point.

Joe DiMaggio was away on military service, and the team, which won the World Series that year, was represented at the game by catcher Bill Dickey; second baseman Joe Gordon; outfielders Charlie Keller and Johnny Lindell; and pitchers Tiny Bonham and Spud Chandler.

None of the six Yankees representatives got into the game, which was held at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Their exclusion was especially notable because the selection decisions were made by Joe McCarthy – the Yankees’ manager.

“We didn’t need them,” McCarthy said boastfully after the game. “We were there early enough at the front. Besides, these other guys deserved a chance to shine. The Yankees have had enough of the limelight.”

In his account of the gamewrote The New York Times’ John Drebinger of the AL’s dominance in the game—it was the league’s eighth win in 11 All-Star Games—saying that McCarthy’s choice not to use any of his own players only proved how superior his league’s roster was. .

“It was, to say the least, a very astonishing demonstration of the junior circuit’s superstore of all-around talent and seemed to kill the long-standing cry of National Leaguers that it was the Yankees and not the American League that was forever knocking. them,” wrote Drebinger.

The AL goes into this year’s All-Star Game on a nine-game winning streak. Holding on to that streak without the use of Yankees players could once again prove the power of the junior circuit.