Benetti: Avisail Garcia looks like an all-star right now

Baseball is a game that erodes belief as much as it creates it.

For every team that comes back from major deficit to win a division, there's another that coughed up that same possible title. For each two-strike hit, there's a pitcher who gave it up.

And for every all-star player, there's a moment when he looked like anything but.

For Avisail Garcia of the Chicago White Sox, it just so happens that the "moment" was the balance of two full seasons. Now, roughly four years after he came to the South Side from the Motor City, he's scheduled to go to Miami to join the best in the game this week for the 88th MLB All-Star Game.

If you defended Garcia over that two-year span, you were in the minority. Most of the assessments about Avisail Garcia during that time centered on the likelihood that his potential would remain untapped. And neither side was capital I "incorrect," to this moment.

Part of the fun of baseball is in trusting what you've seen before and believing it will happen again. There were moments - especially in the first 42 games after the trade in 2013 - when Garcia looked the part of "Mini-Miggy," as he was called, in both reference and deference to his former teammate, Miguel Cabrera.

Part of the agony of baseball is not seeing the things you think you should be seeing. With corner-outfield/designated hitter slugging percentages of .365 and .385 over the past two seasons, Garcia was below league average for his position, and it wasn't close. This season, he's slugging .502, which is a stark departure.

But, baseball is a long game - both within the confines of a nine-inning affair and a career. To think that someone's arc is finished being drawn is to disregard the novelty of the game. At the same time, to do so is also practical and rational.

With the proliferation of shifts, one of the most enchanting parts of the current game happens when a batter defies all evidence of where he has placed the ball in his prior at-bats and plops the cowhide on a desolate grassy outpost not manned by human hands (or gloves). The way to combat perfect information is to subvert the information.

That said, all we have with which to forecast is history and probability. Logic and the numbers suggest that it was much more likely this season for Avi Garcia to do what he did in 2015 and '16 rather than the numbers he has compiled in the first half of this season.

And folks who are repelled by big data may attempt to use Garcia as a reason to discard history and data.

There are countless players, though, who have put together repetitive seasons that follow the numbers. An anomaly does not inherently torpedo the data set's predictive value.

We can simultaneously enjoy the unique and believe that history is destined to repeat itself. These two feelings are not mutually exclusive. It's what margins of error are for.

As we watch Avisail Garcia - and his fellow combatants this weekend - in a moment in their careers, we can only guess - albeit in a very educated way - at what's next.

• Jason Benetti is a play-by-play broadcaster for the Chicago White Sox, as well as ESPN. Follow him on Twitter @jasonbenetti.