Today is the last day to vote for your Major League Baseball All-Stars. The All-Star Game is being held in St. Louis' Busch Stadium on July 14, 2009. During my lunch hour, I decided to vote on-line for my choice of All-Stars, since today's society demands that every skills competition have some element of a popularity contest to it. This way, a bunch of idiots who know nothing about the competition and who have nothing better to do in life than to dial a phone 4000 times or think up computer programs to automate millions of votes can fill the pockets of TV networks, sponsors, and athletic leagues. After I got done casting my one vote, I made the mistake of checking the current voting results.
The general public has upheld my opinion of it.
I have a number of issues with the Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Stars Game:
Problem #1: Putting the choice of All-Stars in the hands of the general public. In a nutshell, MLB is divided into two leagues--the American League and the National League. Thirty-three players from each league are chosen to compete in the All-Star Game. Most of the players are chosen by fan voting.
Problem #2: Why are we choosing All-Stars in the middle of a season? These guys are "All-Stars" after playing half a season? I'm more impressed with the guys who can put together an entire season of All-Star worthy stats.
Problem #3: Since 2003, the league that wins the All-Star Game gets home field advantage in the World Series. So never mind that your team makes it to the World Series after having the best record in baseball. If the other league won the All-Star Game, your team's regular season dominance means nothing. In a game where any team can beat any other team on any given day, home field advantage in the league's championship series comes down to a single exhibition game that was played three months earlier by a bunch of guys selected by the idiot general public. The team may have included two or three guys from your team, each of whom might have played an inning or two. Brilliant.
So, back to the current results from the All-Star balloting. My favorite team is the Oakland A's, who are in the American League. The A's are wretched this year, so I certainly don't expect any of them to make the All-Star team, but I naturally gravitate to the American League first.
I read through the results of the American League first basemen. They seemed reasonable. Second base? A battle between two deserving guys, Dustin Pedroia with the Boston Red Sox and Ian Kinsler with the Texas Rangers. Third base? I was happy to see Evan Longoria of the Tampa Bay Rays running away with it, but my jaw dropped when I saw who was in second place.
Alex Rodriguez.
WHAT?! This is the same New York Yankee who missed the first month of the season with an injury?! The same Rodriguez who admitted in February to using steroids in past seasons?! The same A-Rod who is currently batting .239?! Nice job, Yankees fans! Way to stuff the ballot box with votes for a cheater who sucks during the two months of the season he has played so far.
I was still recovering from the A-Rod thing when I got to the list of outfielders. Tell me, which one of these guys you think would deserve to be an All-Star?
Player A: .219 batting average, 10 home runs, 23 runs scored, 26 runs batted in, 0 stolen bases
Player B: .292 batting average, 15 home runs, 57 runs scored, 47 runs batted in, 8 stolen bases
Player C: .298 batting average, 8 home runs, 46 runs scored, 52 runs batted in, 2 stolen bases
Player A is 7th in the voting. Player B is 8th. Player C is a distant 12th. Oh, did I mention that Player A is named Ken Griffey, Jr.? Player B is Johnny Damon of the Yankees. Player C is Nick Markakis of the Baltimore Orioles. "Who?!", you might ask. Exactly the problem with the general public voting on All-Stars. No one outside of Baltimore has heard of Nick Markakis, so he gets no votes. But everyone has heard of Ken Griffey, Jr., even though he's a washed-up almost-40-year-old has-been part-time player.
The National League voting is even worse.
Granted, my favorite player, Albert Pujols (pictured above) is running away with the first baseman contest, and he'll get to start as an All-Star in his home stadium. Way cool.
Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Chase Utley is deservedly demolishing the competition at second base.
Ditto for New York Mets third baseman David Wright.
But at shortstop, it's a fairly close race between the Florida Marlins' Hanley Ramirez and...............Jimmy Rollins from the Phillies?! Are you freakin' kidding me, Philadelphia?! Rollins is playing so badly that he just got benched for a week! He's batting .205 on the season, people!! He's 0-for-his-last-27! Since his week-long benching, he's gone 0-for-8! And THAT'S who you want to send to the All-Star Game?!
I love the Chicago Cubs, but when I saw that Alfonso Soriano is in fourth place in the outfielder voting, I had to beat my head against my desk. Soriano's "All-Star" batting average? .230. He has batted .198 and hit a grand total of two home runs in the last month--on June 2 and June 7.
Worse than seeing Soriano in fourth place was seeing Manny Ramirez in 7th place. The Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder is just wrapping up his 50-game suspension for testing positive for steroids. He hasn't played since May 6, and any stats he accumulated this year were enhanced by a banned substance. Thank you, Los Angeles, for rewarding a cheater.
At least San Franciscans were smart enough not to write-in Barry Bonds. That cheater hasn't played in two years, but something tells me that if he had been a Dodger, he'd be leading the votes for outfielders.
Oh, and keep in mind that these are the guys who are going to determine home field advantage at the World Series in October!
If I was a major league baseball player, it would be a tremendous honor to be chosen as an All-Star by the other players, managers, and coaches. Who else knows more about the game and could accurately assess my production?
Inevitably, after the balloting is complete, you'll be able to read articles all over the place about how so-and-so got stiffed from the All-Star Game, and how so-and-so should have made the roster. But this is what happens when you put the general public in charge of something that most of them know very little about.
Adding to the brilliance of MLB's All-Star plan is that they allow each person to vote up to 25 times. Or, rather, each e-mail address to vote 25 times. It's pretty tough to find a way around that one, isn't it?
Now if you'll excuse me, there are no Oakland A's on the leaderboard at any position, so I'm going to vote another 24 times by entering my e-mail address, then 25 more times using my work e-mail address, then 25 more times using my wife's e-mail address, another 25 times with her work e-mail address, and 25 times a piece with every one of my friends' and coworkers' e-mail addresses. I might even set up some bogus Yahoo and Hotmail e-mail accounts to get 25 votes a piece out of those, too. I figure that if I really work hard on this for the next 12 to 18 hours, I can probably single-handedly get Jose Canseco voted in as an All-Star. It would make about as much sense as Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Jimmy Rollins, Alfonso Soriano, and Manny Ramirez.
All excellent points. A couple of things:
ReplyDelete* Cal Ripken was voted into the All-Star game years after his play rated the honor. I don't think it hurt the game at all to have him there. Fans loved the guy, they voted him in.
* Alex Rodriguez has a low batting average, but he's hit the b-jeezus out of the ball all year. On performance, he belongs there. Yes, he's missed a month, but it's hard to argue that his performance is not All-Star caliber. Now, as for steroids, sure, punish him.
* The All-Star game is, to me, an amusing exhibition game. I don't attach much meaning to All-Star appearances because, as you said, folks are voting on three months of stats. Three months isn't a large enough sample to prove anything in baseball. I don't much care about a hot-hitting youngster halfway through his first good season. I would rather see players like Ken Griffey in his last season, Alex Rodriguez crushing the ball as usual.
That's just my personal take on the matter. And I love baseball very much. I just don't put much stock in the All-Star honors.
Today anyone of us can look at all the stats online and see who the best players are. I don't trust the baseball managers or players to do a better job of rating the players than I could do myself. In fact, those guys screw up the Gold Glove awards every year. So if someone is going to screw up the All-Star selections, let it be the fans.
Those are great points, Doug. When you present it like that, maybe my bigger issue is the determination of home field advantage in the World Series based on the All-Star Game. Now that the results of the All-Star Game carry so much weight, the player selection process seems ludicrous to me. I viewed it as an amusing exhibition game before 2003, too. Now that I look at things from your perspective, if the home field advantage thing wasn't in play, I don't think I'd care if the fans simply voted for their favorites, despite statistical production.
ReplyDeleteI still have a real issue with the steroid users, though. The penalties just aren't harsh enough for the superstars. Sure, throw some borderline AAA player out for 50 games, and that hurts. But Manny Ramirez? That's just a nice little vacation for him. He's worth 80 bazillion dollars and is assured of returning to his starting position on a major league club, so aside from a couple of uncomfortable press conferences, a 50-game suspension is nothing to him. Ban steroids users for life and bar them from the Hall of Fame, and I bet the steroids problem goes away real quickly.
I totally agree with all of your points technically, I was just saying that I don't put much stock in the game itself nor in the prestige of being an All-Star. But you mentioned something I forgot--the home field advantage. Now the game actually does mean something, so yes, we should probably come up with a more objective measure of the teams on the field.
ReplyDeleteAlso, steroids. Fifty games is a lot. Is it enough? Maybe not. The money is not issue for the top players. But 50 games worth of home runs and hits and RBIs and all those other HOF stats is a lot. Maybe that is enough punishment.
But in any case, no way should a guy go to the All-Star game who was caught cheating that very same year! I fully expect MLB to come up with some policy on this issue this winter.
Brilliant blog, by the way. I love the corrections stuff and I don't even work in public service!
Thanks for the compliment!
ReplyDeleteI found an interesting column this evening that even mentions some of the same players I mentioned. And the author made the same point you did about cheaters not going to the All-Star Game the same year in which they were disgraced.
http://bases.newsvine.com/_news/2009/07/06/3002361-its-not-the-all-first-half-game?category=sports