It's that time of summer again- the MLB All-Stars have been announced. Well, most of them. Fans have the opportunity to vote for one more player, between two, in each league.
Josh Hamilton won the most fan votes this year with over eleven million, to which he said, "Thinking about that many people voting, it means a lot." SERIOUSLY, Josh? Perhaps Hamilton is unaware of exactly HOW MLB All-Star voting works.
First of all, the season itself starts in April. About a month later, in the beginning of May, Major League Baseball runs commercials on television and sends out emails to fans who subscribe to their services, urging them to vote for "their favorite players" for the All-Star Game. The rules for voting are simple. You may only vote ten times per day per email address. You do not have to vote on stats or performance of any kind. You can vote for a player because he's your favorite, because you think he's cute, because you like his name. And you can do this TEN TIMES A DAY FROM EVERY E-MAIL ADDRESS YOU HAVE.
Sure, there are the purists, who vote by the numbers, who want to see the best players in the game face off against each other, but they are far outnumbered by those fans who are voting for players based on popularity or team loyalty.
Then, for the most part, those people who voted an obscene number of times for all the wrong players for all the wrong reasons will tune into the State Farm Home Run Derby- because baseball today glorifies the longball (all the while pretending to the PED era that produced the upturn in that particular stat, but that is a different post for a different day). Those fans will watch the Derby, but will not watch the actual All-Star Game, because the All-Star Game is always one of two things: it is either a blowout, and becomes uninteresting quickly, or it is a long, slow pitcher's battle. The fans who vote for all the players on their team, only to end up with none of the members of their team on the field, aren't interested in those games.
Unfortunately, what we forget in all the hubub of who made the team/who gets snubbed, how many votes this player got, who makes up the teams (teams?) for the Home Run Derby is that the All-Star Game has World Series implications. The League that wins the All-Star Game gets home field advantage for the World Series.
OH WAIT!!!! You mean, if MY team, in the National League, makes it to World Series, and they have a better overall record than the American League team that makes it to the World Series, home field advantage has already been decided on by a stupid game played back in July, a game in which the players were picked, not by the managers of the teams- who were the managers of last year's World Series teams, not by the players themselves- which would still be somewhat of a popularity contest, but would still have players chosen mostly by performance, not by sportswriters even, DEFINITELY not by statistics, but by morons with five email addresses, a Coors Lite, and too much time on their hands??? Tell me how THAT is beneficial for the game.
In no other major professional sport in America does the outcome of the Championship rely so much on the outcome of the All-Star Game, which relies solely on the votes of the fans. This is one of the major flaws of the post season system, but it is kept in place, because without it, the All-Star Game would be irrelevant, as are ALL other All-Star Games. It's okay to have a superfluous game in the middle of the season- that game is a gift to the players from the fans, and a gift to the fans from the players. But PLEASE don't hang the Series on it!!!
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