Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw are the two Dodgers who will represent the team at the 2012 All-Star Game.

Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw are headed back to the All-Star game.

Kemp and Kershaw were selected to their second National League All-Star teams Sunday. Both players made their All-Star debuts last year.

Both played well enough, but both partially got in due to name recognition…

Excluded from the team were Andre Ethier, who is tied for third in the NL with 55 runs batted in, and Chris Capuano, who is 9-3 with a 2.69 ERA.

…which is exactly why it’s hard to complain about Andre Ethier and Chris Capuano getting left out. Especially when Zack Greinke and James McDonald didn’t even make it.

Beyond The Box Score: Glenn DuPaul takes a look at the most valuable players of April and May. A.J. Ellis tops the hitter’s list, while former Dodger James McDonald tops the pitcher’s list.

The New Yorker: Scientifically, what makes players choke?

So far, so obvious: the extra money led people to get more excited about the potential rewards, which led them to work harder. This is why businesses give people bonuses.

However, when the subjects actually began playing the video game, the striatum did something very peculiar. All of a sudden, the activity of the brain area became inversely related to the magnitude of the reward; bigger incentives led to less excitement. Furthermore, activity in the insula was closely correlated with success, with decreased activity leading to decreased performance.

What explains this result? The researchers argue that the subjects were victims of loss aversion, the well-documented psychological phenomenon that losses make us feel bad more than gains make us feel good.

There is something poignant about this deconstruction of choking. It suggests that the reason some performers fall apart on the back nine or at the free-throw line is because they care too much. They really want to win, and so they get unravelled by the pressure of the moment. The simple pleasures of the game have vanished; the fear of losing is what remains.

Basically? Because they care about winning.