Welcome to May. It's time to vote for the MLB all-star teams! Major League baseball is getting the word out on its site, asking fans to vote up to 25 times for their favorite players. 25 times! That's at least 24 times too many. Why should someone get 25 votes? It's kind of an arbitrary figure, isn't it, 25? Why not 250? Why more than once? Why should fans get to vote at all? How about you get one vote to pick players for the All-Star game. There aren't 25 of me, and if there are 25 of you I'm concerned for all 26 of us. Actually, I'm concerned for more than just us.
I'm also concerned that MLB thinks May is a good time to start voting. May is the fifth month of the calendar year, but in baseball it only comes second. April, May, June and part of July must all be played prior to All-Star Week. This pushes back the Mid-Summer Classic just past the halfway point of the season, which is good, because the All-Star Game historically has rewarded the players that have performed well over the first half of the season, not the first third of the season. This year's game is scheduled for smack dab in the middle of the season's fourth month, July 15th. So, in honor of that famous day, which is also the date of the First Crusade back in 1099, lets go on a short crusade of our own and slaughter the system that is voting for the All-Star teams. It's outdated, and it's dumb.
By starting voting during the first week of May, baseball gives fans a chance to vote for players who have not yet performed for one third of the time they'll have to play prior to the break. Oh, and you can vote 25 times right now. So lets say a pitcher like Cliff Lee gets all 25 of alot of peoples' votes right now, and then turns back into the real Cliff Lee, the one who's never been better than good. He'll keep all those votes, whether he deserved them or not, and that's not right.
I understand why voting started so early in years past. Back in say, 1982, when going to the ballpark was your best chance to get a ballot to vote for the likes of MVP candidate Jim Rice & company baseball gave fans one opportunity to vote per ballgame attended. If you only had a chance to go to a single game between May and July you still got some say in who started in the All-Star Game. It made sense back then. It doesn't make sense now. In this day in age we've got a little something called the internet which allows us to vote online for this year's MLB All-Star Game. Why not push voting back to the first week of July, so fans can use their 25 votes to pump the players that actually deserve to be in the next week's game? Why not limit the vote to one per fan, so everyone gets an equal say whether they could get to a ballpark or not.
Whether we like it or not (I don't), the All-Star Game matters. The winning league earns home-field advantage in the World Series. Therefore, we need a system that more accurately determines who's worthy of playing in the game. That said, why the heck are fans picking the starting lineups in the first place? Shouldn't the leagues choose the players they want to help them earn home-field advantage? That would be truly democratic and not dumb.
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