Latest All-Star results not good; they're grrrreat!
I’m sorry but what’s happening in the American League All-Star voting isn’t just a good thing. It’s THE BEST THING.
I am completely serious about this. The voting process is a joke. Granted, there have always been jokey things about it. Even when the players were doing all the voting, back in the old days. But when Major League Baseball essentially sold the All-Star balloting to the highest bidder – this year it’s esurance, which I believe is a company that sells insurance policies for AOL e-mail accounts – and excised paper ballots from the system, then it became purely a function of the enthusiasm of a team’s fans.
Punching a few hundred paper ballots was a lot of work; I loved my team in the pre-Internet days, but even I wouldn’t punch more than a dozen or so ballots.*
* Actually, I usually voted for whomever I considered the players, even in my misspent youth. I probably was at least a little biased, though...
Now, though? Most people have two or three e-mail addresses, and enterprising sorts can easily collect two or three more. At 35 ballots per address, that’s ... what? Somewhere between 150 and 200 ballots for anyone who really cares?
In 2015, it seems a lot of Royals fans really care.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this; caring is good!
But the system’s a joke, because it allows – arguably encourages! – caring people to make a mockery of the results, if not the process itself (which was already a well-known mockery).
What’s happening now is THE BEST THING because the process, however flawed wasn’t going to change without some wildly ridiculous, preposterous results. Which it looks like we’ll soon have.
This is THE BEST THING because we’ll be treated to the surreal spectacle of the American League’s smallest market placing seven or eight players in the All-Star Game’s starting lineup and Major League Baseball will be forced to make the process at least slightly less ridiculous.
Not until next year, though. This year, all we can do is sit back and enjoy the sights and sounds of disruption.
