Voting Woes Beyond Hanging Chads
Posted by Seth Walder | Posted in MLB | Posted: May 29, 2009 at 7:57 am
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The MLB All-Star game is flawed. Yes, I know, the All-Star game is mostly about having fun, bringing good players together to joke around, watching a home run derby and playing a meaningless game where the starter lasts two innings. So given all of that, who cares if the voting system that decides which players make the game is a little flawed? Me.
There are two problems. Firstly, several years ago Bud Selig decided it was a great idea to change home field advantage in the World Series to the league that won the All-Star game, rather than just the previous alternating method. I have no idea what brought this ridiculous idea into his head, only about 10 percent of the players in the game will be in the Fall Classic. However, I do understand that the game is not exactly meant to be competitive, and this way it essentially leaves home-field advantage up to chance. I just would have preferred leaving it to actual chance, like a coin flip or something. Or just the old way. Whatever. But what I really have a problem with, is that when it comes time to measure a player’s career, maybe to consider them for Cooperstown, one of the many categories we look at is All-Star selections. How can these selections have any merit if I have to read articles like this? Fans stuff ballot boxes, teams with bigger fan bases vote more. Teams that are winning get people to vote more. The offensive starters in the All-Star game often are not the best people that could be out there, which creates a serious problem later on.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy with the way pitchers are selected, simply by the manager of the team that year. I like the fan involvement. I think there should be fan involvement. But what would be better would be waiting another week or two to put the ballots out, and having the ballots be smaller. Have the manager pick four or five guys from each position to put on the ballot. Right now every random guy that has started 15 games is on there. Jed Lowrie is on the ballot. Why? By making the ballots smaller it means that just playing in New York or Manny just being Manny doesn’t get you to the All-Star Game.
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First of all, I am a big fan of having the All-Star game matter for something. We can look at the NFL Pro Bowl (which occurs after the season), the NBA All-Star game and the NHL All-Star game, which don’t matter at all, and they are incredibly boring. It’s great to have the players come together and compete for a common goal even if some teams have no chance of making it to the playoffs.
In the past few days I have read that fans of Manny Ramirez are actually rallying for #99 to make the All-Star game. WHAT? Getting suspended 50 games for steroid abuse does not merit an All-Star selection. I know this really hasn’t been a problem yet with big name players, but the MLB needs to make a rule taking suspended players off of the ballots. Buster Olney on ESPN even said Ramirez has a good chance of being selected. I personally think it would be a disgrace if he was an All-Star this year.
I agree with Adam that the All-Star Game should have a motivating factor besides providing a chummy meeting between the AL and NL. By making the prize homefield advantage baseball fans may be more willing to vote for the players they want representing their league.
Also, it is true that teams are more comfortable on their own field but it seems like in baseball the home crowd is not as influential over the attitude and effort of the players as it is in basketball for instance. So the All-Star home field result shouldn’t be considered that controversial.
The voting system for the All-Star game is ridiculous and there should be regulations about how many ballots people can fill out and system for collecting them that is not unattended drop bins in MLB parks.
http://www.scoresreport.com/2008/10/23/which-sport-has-the-biggest-home-field-advantage/
Adam’s link surprises me. Anyone could have pointed out that the NBA is where home court matters the most, but we always talk about how much home field/ice matters in the NFL and NHL, so really, we should be saying the same thing for baseball.
An alternative solution that I like is that simply the team that wins the most games in the regular season receives home field advantage for the World Series.
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