Major League Baseball All-Star voting is a joke.
It’s a joke because the average schmo gets to vote. Some knucklehead who doesn’t know a baseball bat from a vampire bat and votes blindly for his own team gets to help decide who plays in the All-Star game. Then the winner of the All-Star game gets home-field advantage in the World Series.
That sequence makes no sense. Fan voting goes down as one of the worst ideas of all time, right along side New Coke and those devices that turn urine into drinking water.
Don’t believe that the fans have screwed up? Let’s take a look at this year’s voting so far.
The Phillies are five games above .500. Yet six of their eight position players are in the top five of every All-Star category. The only one that isn’t is Jayson Werth who is ninth in outfield voting.
Jimmy Rollins is second in the voting for NL second baseman. He’s hitting .211 with 27 RBIs. He has over 700,000 more votes than Miguel Tejada who is hitting .330 with 41 RBIs.
The Brewers are also just five games over .500. They have six of their eight position players in the top five of every All-Star category.
Ricky Weeks is third in voting for NL second baseman. He was declared out for the season in mid-May.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers are 20 games over .500 and their highest vote-getter, Manny Ramirez, will have missed at least 50 games before the All-Star break. Ramirez is seventh in All-Star voting among NL outfielders. Teammates Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier are 13th and 14th respectively in outfield voting. Kemp is hitting .311 with 10 home runs and 41 RBIs, and Ethier has 14 homers and 50 RBIs.
The highest ranked Dodger is Orlando Hudson who is second among NL second basemen. No other Dodger is in the top five at his position.
In the American League voting, the Yankees and Red Sox have players ranked in the top five at first base, second base, shortstop, third base and catcher.
Boston’s Jed Lowrie is fifth among shortstops. Nick Green has been Boston’s everyday shortstop for most of the first half while Lowrie has been on the DL.
Josh Hamilton is third in outfield voting but hasn’t played a game since May 31.
Victor Martinez leads AL catchers in homers and RBIs and is second behind Joe Mauer in batting average. He is fifth in catcher voting. Jason Varitek of Boston is second. He’s batting .235.
Notice the trend here? The baseball-crazed towns are stuffing the ballot boxes with their guys, deserving or not. Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Milwaukee are all good teams with huge fan bases. However, that doesn’t mean those teams should send six guys apiece to the All-Star game while deserving players from smaller market teams get snubbed or have to hope to be a manager’s selection.
A guy like Curtis Granderson from the Tigers, who’s one of the few five-tool players in baseball, is in the midst of a season where he’s batting .263 with 18 home runs, 43 RBIs, 48 runs scored and 13 stolen bases. He’s a key cog on a first place team that has a chance to go to the World Series. He should get the chance to play for home-field advantage in the Fall Classic. He probably won’t. He’s 13th in outfield voting.
This wouldn’t happen if fans weren’t allowed to vote in players. Who knows how this system started in the first place. It was probably a ploy by the league to spark interest and make the fan feel involved.
Nice try, terrible result.
Instead of getting the most deserving player in the All-Star game, we are stuck with the most popular player. Not exactly the system MLB should have stuck with when home-field advantage was awarded to the winning league of the Midsummer Classic.
The voting should rest with the players and the managers. By the time the All-Star games rolls around almost every team will have played all the other teams from its own league. The players and managers will have had an up close view of the best of the best.
Let them decide who should help their league try and lock down home-field advantage, not the guy with the beer belly 12 rows up in the nosebleed section.
Local Sports
Column: Vote no to fan voting
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