The Midsummer Classic has become a midsummer farce.
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred should do something about it before a game that was once a highlight of the summer is lost forever as just another bloated, made-for-TV, hype-driven event — like the NFL’s Pro Bowl.
There are many things wrong with the All-Star Game, starting with former commissioner Bud Selig’s decision to give the winning league home-field advantage in the World Series. That ridiculous concept has been going on since 2003. Manfred should change that ASAP.
The home-field advantage concept is made even worse by the fact that fans vote for the starting position players for the American and National League teams. Imagine that: Home-field advantage in baseball’s championship event rests, initially at least, in the hands of the fans who vote and the PR machines that generate the most publicity.
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Actually, vote is not the right term. Stuffing the proverbial ballot box is more accurate. And nobody has done it better this time around than fans of the Kansas City Royals. The latest updated voting totals in the AL, released last Monday, have eight Royals players in line to start the July 14 game in Cincinnati. All-world center fielder Mike Trout was the only Royals player not in the starting lineup. Voting ends July 2.
K.C. first baseman Eric Hosmer is one of baseball’s bright young stars and deserves consideration to make the team, but there is no way he should start ahead of Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera, who is hitting .345 with 15 homers and an OPS of 1.044. Yet as of last week, Hosmer had 5.7 million votes, nearly half a million more than Cabrera.
Even Hosmer seemed embarrassed.
“If I’m Miguel Cabrera, I’m looking at myself like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Hosmer told Yahoo Sports. “Miguel is a candidate and should be the starter.”
But Royals manager Ned Yost said there is a simple solution to the problem.
“There’s nothing wrong,” Yost told USA Today Sports. “Vote! The votes are the votes. If you don’t like it, go out there and vote. Our fans have gotten out and voted. Does seven starters surprise you? Yeah. But once you sit back and think about it, it’s really not that surprising.”
Hey, I don’t blame the Royals’ fans. A tip of the ballcap for their enthusiasm. And although MLB says it is invalidating more than 60 million flawed online ballots for the All-Star Game, MLB did not point the finger at Royals fans.
Manfred, in typical “commissioner speak,” said it’s too early to worry about the voting process.
“We have 16 days left. Lots of years we’ve worried about lots of things in respect to fan voting, but in general over time, fans have done a pretty good job, so we’ll see how it all turns out,” Manfred told reporters last week at Fenway Park in Boston. “What I would say is I hope over time that what people come to think about the commissioner’s office is when we have a situation such as this — this is one example — that we are responsive and open to change if in fact it appears we get a result that is not consistent with the goals of the system that is currently in place.”
Umm, OK.
Of course this isn’t the first the ballot-box stuffing fiasco. In the 1957 All-Star Game in St. Louis, fans voted in seven Cincinnati Reds as starters. Commissioner Ford Frick concluded that half of the ballots came from Cincinnati and put Willie Mays and Hank Aaron in the starting lineup in place of Reds outfielders Gus Bell and Wally Post. Frick took away the fan vote, which wasn’t restored until 1970.
Manfred could do that this year. In the future, let the players vote for the starters from their own league. Let the manager select the pitchers, as they do now. Let the fans vote for a few final positions to fill out the all-star rosters.
Patrick Saunders: psaunders@denverpost.com or
Spotlight on …
A.J. Pollock, center fielder, Diamondbacks
What’s up: He’s not the face of the Diamondbacks; that honor belongs to all-star first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. And because he plays in Arizona, his skills tend to get overlooked. But when A.J. Pollock jogs out to center field Tuesday night at Coors Field, Rockies fans will be looking at one of the best outfielders in baseball.
Background: Pollock, 27, played three years at Notre Dame. He was drafted in the first round in 2009 (17th overall pick) and made his debut in April 2012. He has not had a meteoric rise, in part because his 2014 season was limited to 75 games when he had to undergo surgery after being hit in the hand by a pitch. But he’s having an excellent season, entering Saturday hitting .310 with eight homers and 31 RBIs.
Saunders’ take: Chances are, Pollock won’t be in the All-Star Game, though he deserves the honor. There is a flaw in a system in which Pollock doesn’t rank in the National League’s top 15 outfielders, but the St. Louis Cardinals’ Jason Heyward — hitting .263 entering Saturday with six homers and 20 RBIs — ranks seventh in fan voting. Nonetheless, Pollock is becoming an outfielder whom fans should know. From late in the 2013 season through Wed- nesday, he had a .312 average, .363 on-base, .485 slugging and 31 steals in 584 at-bats. Plus, he gobbles up ground in center field and plays Gold Glove-caliber defense. He’s a solid, no-nonsense player who is establishing himself as a franchise building block, much like Rockies second baseman DJ LeMahieu.
