First held in Chicago as part of the 1933 World’s Fair, the MLB All-Star Game was originally intended to be a one-time event showcasing the best baseball players of the generation. But its immense popularity led it to becoming a permanent fixture of the baseball season, being played every year with the exception of 1945 due to wartime travel restrictions. This tradition continued last night with the 87th MLB All-Star Game, which took place in Petco Park in San Diego.
Accordingly, an inevitable part of this tradition is the griping over which players were snubbed from starting and/or participating in the game. The process and rules that determine how the 68 All-Stars are selected is a lengthy and complicated process, which, for the sake of brevity and sanity I will simplify as such: fans are allowed to select 17 position players (eight in the National League, nine in the American League) who will start the game, exclusively through Internet voting. The remaining 51 pitchers and reserve players are selected by a combination of player/coach/manager votes and managerial commission, as well as a last-minute “Final Vote” opportunity for fans to select a single player for each team who may have been overlooked. Injury replacements and the “one-representative-from-each-MLB-team” rule further complicate the selections, but the bottom line is that the public has free rein over who will start and, thus, will play in the All-Star Game—many of the reserve players will not get a chance to actually play in the event.
As you can imagine, allowing the fans to vote virtually anonymously over the Internet can cause a number of problems. While there are many fans who do preserve the integrity of the game by voting for those who truly deserve it, there are just as many “ballot-stuffers” who will vote only for players from their favorite team. This skews the voting to favor players from larger and/or more vocal fanbases. The most egregious example of this was perhaps last year’s AL voting, which featured eight Kansas City Royals players in the starting lineup before the MLB apparently cancelled some 60 million fraudulent votes.
Even this year, it’s arguable that the voting has been stacked in favor of Chicago Cubs players, with five Cubs players in the NL starting lineup. Of course, some of these picks are well-deserved, but even those who aren’t sabermetrically inclined should question how shortstop Addison Russell deserves the starting spot over his LA Dodger counterpart Corey Seager. It certainly doesn’t help that the MLB makes it incredibly easy to cast these unfair votes. A unique email is granted 35 seventeen-player ballots without a verification process, allowing anyone with a simple browser script to inundate votes for whomever they please.
35 is a completely nonsensical number that’s used to inflate the votes. You might ask, if everyone can vote 35 times, why not keep it simple and allow one vote per person instead? The running theory: because it sounds much more grandiose to say that Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve has 2.2 million votes instead of just 62,000.
The MLB is not the only league to resort to the absurdity of online voting: the NHL revamped their All-Star Game format last year, prompting fans to vote for obviously undeserving, career journeyman John Scott. Needless to say, the NHL reacted quite poorly to this selection, but it mostly worked out; as a final insult to injury, fans selected Scott as the All-Star Game MVP as a write-in candidate via Twitter voting. But even if it hadn’t resolved as nicely as the way it did, the impact would have been limited to simply a few bruised egos and salty fans. Here is where the MLB differs with any other major professional sports league in America: the outcome of the typically ceremonial All-Star Game has a direct consequence on the outcome of the baseball season.
In 2003, commissioner Bud Selig, under the catchphrase “This Time It Counts,” introduced a new rule in which the winning side of the All-Star Game (AL vs. NL) would be granted home-field advantage for the best-of-seven World Series. This decision was thought to be an attempt at galvanizing waning interest in the event, which had until then simply been a formality. But in a sport where the home team wins 54.2% of the time, this new rule placed significant impact on the outcome of a single game, already compromised by dubious voting tactics.
At the time, the idea was considered absurd, and in recent years, this sentiment has not changed much. There are some who claim that it doesn’t matter much, and if anything, it’s just as arbitrary as the previous system of alternating between AL and NL home-field advantage. Personally, I agree that indeed it will not have a tremendous effect, and, in the long run, having home-field advantage adds only a small amount of bias towards an already arbitrary playoff system. But it is simply undeniable that there will be situations where having that home-field advantage is crucial to the outcome of the series.
The most straightforward example is the 2011 World Series, which featured the Texas Rangers versus the St. Louis Cardinals. After some wild Game 6 theatrics, it was in part thanks to a homerun by then-Milwaukee Brewer Prince Fielder and a timely pinch-hit by Los Angeles Dodger Andre Ethier in that year’s All-Star Game that allowed Game 7 to be played in St. Louis instead of Arlington. On what grounds can the home field of the very last and most important game of the season be decided by what a bunch of “fan-picked” players completely irrelevant to the situation did in July? There is simply no justification for letting the All-Star Game matter at all. Game 7 was easily won by the Cardinals.
One might claim that the 2014 World Series is a counterexample in that the Royals had home field advantage in Game 7 thanks to that year’s All-Star Game, but lost at home against the Giants. Really, if anything, this shows that the Giants were able to push out a win even in the face of slightly more adversity. Individual baseball games are a crapshoot. It’s a game of probabilities, and each small percentage matters towards the end result.
If the MLB continues to be adamant about forcibly giving the All-Star Game any significance, the league should, at the very least, revisit the method in which votes are cast. Under the assumption that the MLB intends to keep the All-Star Game an event in which the best and not the most popular players partake, either increased policing and patching should be done to ensure that voter fraud is not so easily possible or fan selection should be limited (if not removed), perhaps as in in the NFL, through the use of a weighted average of the fan votes and the player/coach/managerial votes to determine the game’s starters.
Junu Bae is a graduate student in the chemistry department.
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