A Red Sox fan suggested that Red Sox Nation vote Lastings Milledge onto the all-star team. Unintended consequences? If you are a big fan of a team, and you think your team has a good shot at making the World Series, shouldn’t you try to put the worst team for the opposing league on the field? If you’re a Dodgers fan right now, don’t you want Los Angeles playing with the home field advantage if they get to the World Series? Why would you vote for any good American League players.
Here are my worst ballots. For the AL:
- 1b – Mike Jacobs
- 2b – Alexi Casilla
- SS- Adam Everett
- 3B – Eric Chavez
- C – Kenji Johjima
- OF – Carlos Gomez, Ken Griffey, JR, Brett Gardner
For the NL:
- 1B- Casey Kotchman
- 2B – David Eckstein
- SS – Luis Rodriguez
- 3B – Emilio Bonifacio
- C – Ivan Rodriguez
- OF – Garret Anderson, Lastings Milledge, Jeff Francoeur
I have submitted this ballot. Maybe everyone should. Then maybe MLB will realize that having the All-Star game bestow home field advantage might cause the fans to game the system in a very negative way. It’s one thing to stuff the ballot box for a marginally good player. It’s another to vote for bad players so your team gets home field advantage.
Posted by David Pinto at 3:16 pm | All-Star Game | Permalink | 15 Comments
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May 6th, 2009 @ 3:24 pm
Yeah, I’m sure this will happen. All these guys are locks in the balloting.
By the way, among qualifiers there are four AL first basemen with a worse OPS than Jacobs, who’s hardly horrible at .802. David isn’t even doing a very good job of executing his own “idea.”
May 6th, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
Career or season, Casey?
May 6th, 2009 @ 3:50 pm
Submitted this ballot 25 times. We need to get 4chan in on the joke as well…we saw what they can do to online voting with the Time Magazine thing.
May 6th, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
Who is eligible to vote on the All Star Ballot?
I think it should be tied with buying a ticket. Buy a ticket for a game on a particular day or a particular week, and you get to vote.
That way you could also prevent system gaming by allocating All Star slots to teams, based on their performance the previous year, and then the fans of the team vote for the players representing that team.
May 6th, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
Oh, I love this idea! I actually hate the idea of the All-Star game affecting home field so much, that I’ve missed the game most years from ‘03 on. They waaayyy overreacted to the extra inning affair in ‘02. I thought the extra inning thing was actually pretty exciting.
I’ll be voting in the NL half of that ballot, as I want the AL to have home field.
heh…and since Alexi Casilla was sent to AAA today, it would be even more hilarious to see if they make him come back up to play in the All-Star game.
May 6th, 2009 @ 4:06 pm
@Ed: Anyone with a computer can vote up to 25 times. If you go to a game, you can get a ballot at each game, although in the past I had no problem grabbing a handful.
May 6th, 2009 @ 4:26 pm
Is Everett really the worst shortstop? He lacks on offense but teams play Everett for his defense. Julio Lugo sucks on both offense and defense, though. Can we vote for him instead?
May 6th, 2009 @ 4:51 pm
honestly, I’m a little disappointed in this post by David. It smacks a little of something that PeteAbe would write, which isn’t exactly a compliment.
May 6th, 2009 @ 5:24 pm
[...] Via Baseball Musings. [...]
May 6th, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
I’m fairly certain if this gained any traction, MLB’s response would be similar to the NHL’s to the Vote for Rory campaign a couple years ago – badmouth the fans for not voting the way they’re supposed to and do everything to find a reason to throw out any results they didn’t like.
May 6th, 2009 @ 6:18 pm
People should not be allowed to vote for President, let alone something as important as the players for the All Star game. I mean, the average IQ is 100, my dog’s IQ is close to that.
May 6th, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
I don’t see the problem as people voting for chumps so that their League is guaranteed a win for the Mid-Summer Classic and subsequently home field advantage for the Fall Classic. I see the problem as having voting begin a couple of weeks into the season.
Wouldn’t it be a far more effective initiative if the league did an “All Star Blitz” where they use a sophisticated process (i.e. anyone but the BBWA or Gold Glove voters) to come up with a list of deserving players a few weeks before the game?
May 6th, 2009 @ 6:52 pm
That’s an excellent idea, Brandon.
May 6th, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
The main problem with this is that it hurts the “bad” player. It make him look like a fool. Imagine if you were a fan voted player to start the All Star game only because your not as good as other players. I don’t like the current system but it’s not fair for the players to be treated this way. I realize that the fan votes are not always right but lets not make a mockery of the whole system.
May 7th, 2009 @ 12:23 am
I too am hardly a fan of the All Star Game determining home field advantage in the World Series. I’m even less of a fan, though, of Red Sox fans somehow thinking that the baseball world revolves around them. (Remember their incessant push to get Varitek onto rhe AL team last season? Oh yeah, he completely deserved that.) The All Star Game has plenty of problems. A newly spoiled, still-incessantly-whiny band of pink hats are not the people to solve them.