The Chris Moeller Archives

The popular vote

Something must change with baseball’s system of electing its All-Stars. The voters don’t know what they’re doing. They possess provincial opinions of which players are truly the best and they vote according to team colors. Of course what I’m advocating here is taking the vote away from the manager and the players and giving the entire voting process to the customers, the fans. What did you think I meant?

The customers should be choosing the reserves and the pitchers that compete in the game, in addition to the starting position players they already select. Day after day during this year's open online balloting, the top story was the Royals. Look at these dumb fans. Look at how the Kansas City rooters are stuffing the online ballot for the members of their squad. First it’s eight Royals, then it’s still six, then five. Well, it ended with four out of nine, and it’s hard to quibble much with any of the final selections-- elite catcher Salvador Perez, shortstop (at a weak AL position) Alcides Escobar, and outfielders Alex Gordon and Lorenzo Cain. Four standout players, all competing for the reigning league championship team that also has the league's best record in 2015. No voting abomination here. In fact, the managers and the players saw fit to add two Royals pitchers to the group. A distracting issue evaporates.

Now let’s talk about an unforgivable voting sin committed by the players and by AL All-Star manager Ned Yost. They snubbed a player with more than 3,000 hits and 600 career home runs, a man who passed Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time home run list earlier this season. Didn't the All-Star Game used to be about honoring aging greats? Like Derek Jeter? Last year? The numbers are there too. A-Rod's 16 homers are the most at his position and he has the 8th best OPS in the entire AL. The seven men ahead of him in that category are on the All-Star team, and so are the five men that come immediately after. His name is Alex Rodriguez, of the New York Yankees, and why did Yost and the players blackball him? Because they don’t like him personally.

A-Rod finished fifth in the fan voting for AL designated hitters. (Maybe he would have finished higher, but MLB canceled 65 million ballots this year, labeling them fraudulent.) Do the fans have a problem with A-Rod’s past steroid use? Not as it would seem, even with a constant drumbeat of negative media attention directed at him. Yankee fans have heartily cheered his hitting exploits all season. Baseball fans at large voted for him more than two million times in May and June, and they selected two other players to the league starting lineups that have served 50-game suspensions in the past for PED use-- Nelson Cruz and Jhonny Peralta. The general attitude of fans towards these once-performance enhanced players seems to be that they have done their time.

There isn’t too much democracy in baseball voting, there’s not enough. If fans had the Hall of Fame vote in place of haughty and entitled veteran sportswriters-- and if Major League Baseball did away with the arrogant “restricted” list it has applied to our nation’s baseball museum-- Pete Rose would be made eligible and inducted posthaste. Polls show that Rose’s cause has had the majority support of the people for years. PED-users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens would be in if fans had their way also. That claim was supported last year when principled sportswriter Dan LeBetard then-anonymously surrendered his ballot to the masses on the Deadspin website.

Writers, players, and managers each have too many voting privileges. They are like the Electoral College of baseball-- dedicated to protecting us from ourselves. This is a subversion of democracy in our democratic republic’s national game, particularly in the case of the Baseball Writers Association of America and the Hall of Fame, where the vice grip and revisionist history of the voters has taken to severely damaging the game. The Hall is currently experiencing severe attendance decline in Cooperstown, New York, and it's no wonder why that would be-- not because people no longer enjoy or appreciate bucolic resort communities on a shimmering lake or history museums dedicated to rich and enthralling topics. It’s because a team made up of Hall-worthy former players that are excluded from the Hall-- Rose, Bonds, Clemens, Joe Jackson, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Mark McGwire, et al-- could now theoretically whip a team of enshrined greats 55 times out of 100.

And while we’re on the topic, why aren’t Curt Flood or Marvin Miller enshrined?

What I’m stumping for is a fan revolution, a dictatorship of the paying customers, maybe "free love" while we're at it. Who better to make the important ceremonial decisions than the people whose dedication to the game have and will always go unpaid? As fanatics, we’ve been persuaded to believe that our expertise is lacking, and the persuaders have been those that stand to gain by our powerlessness. We’re the ones that determine the standards. It’s in the language itself. It’s not called the Hall of Greatness, after all. It’s called the Hall of Fame. For being famous. It’s not the All-Talent Game either. It’s the All-Star Game. For being a star. Google A-Rod. He’s got it covered. 600 home runs and he dated Madonna.

It’s really insulting when you think about it. You get to pick the first team, and then the players and managers are there to fill out the rosters. The implication always is that they’re there to correct your mistakes. Of course, the customer’s not always right, but the boss and the employees aren’t either. Remember that the next time you hear somebody on TV again tell you that the fans shouldn’t get such a loud say when the outcome of the game means so much to the World Series (home field advantage for the winning league). Why is the fan vote always inferred to be so frivolous where the players' and managers’ choices are, if not regarded as perfect, at least always taken of the highest honor? It shouldn't be. Cheering Fans of All Franchises, Unite!

posted by CM @ 10:43 PM