Well, no one saw this one coming. David Wright was beaten out by Pablo Sandoval in a landslide for the privilege of starting the All-Star game for the National League at third base. Wright lost by almost 2 million votes. When MLB gave us the last update about a week ago, David was in front by almost half a million votes. So, what happened?
I suspect that the classy folks over at AT&T Park had a hand in this. The only way I can imagine this huge turnaround was accomplished is that they basically handed everyone in attendance these last few games a stack of 25 ballots with their hometown players pre-punched. Or they had their attendants walking around with iPads with the MLB website open, harassing folks to enter their e-mail address and, “Click here 25 times for our boys.”
I don’t know how else that fat bastard could have edged out David for the job. He obviously has nothing on Wright statistically this year:
Sandoval is batting .307 with 11 doubles 6 homers and 25 RBI
Wright is batting .355 with 26 doubles, 9 homers and 50 RBI
Wright has played a lot more games than Kung-Fu Panda, so he was bound to have more doubles, homers, and RBI than him, but he’s also out-hitting, out-slugging, and out-on-basing him, too.
Sandoval’s teammate Buster Posey led all NL vote-getters.
“What? Are you F-ing kidding me?” you might ask. Well, it makes sense, and I’ll explain why. Posey obviously got (and deserved) his share of clean votes from other teams’ fans. So if you tack-on the bullshit votes that San Francisco treated their players to at the last minute, you get your leading vote-getter in Posey. Just like Wright, Yadier Molina (as much as I despise the guy) deserved to start this game for the NL, but it’s a LOT more debatable.
This system is clearly flawed, and should be changed as long as the game “counts”–the game counts, but the managers still try to get every single player into the game, so they don’t actually manage to win, they manage like it’s a meaningless exhibition. But they will allow this ridiculous voting system to continue on.
Why does everyone get to vote 25 times, per e-mail address?Well, it’s got to be because of money. Isn’t it always? I’m guessing MLB benefits financially from the millions upon millions of extra clicks they register on their website whenever folks vote over and over again. More ad revenue for Bud Selig to line his pockets with. I think one vote per person sounds fair, don’t you? But Mr. Selig probably wouldn’t like to announce that Josh Hamilton led all voters with 440,000 votes. Nope, 11 million sounds wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy better (you think 25 y’s are excessive?) Bud Selig wants everyone to think that people really care about this game and that they’re voting by the millions. But that’s clearly not the case. At least not anywhere besides San Francisco.
Melky Cabrera got 5 million votes in the last week to vault from 4th to 1st in OF voting. He had 7.5 million votes in total. I hope Selig is pressured into doing something about it.
I can’t find any site with the final vote tallies but i read through San Fran Giants blogs website comments and they said Brandon Crawford came in 2nd place for SS and Brandon Belt came in 2nd behind Votto for 1B by like 300k votes. And Freddy Sanchez, who hasn’t played a game in over a year got the 4th most votes at 2B. I kind of wish they all HAD been voted in so it could show how ridiculous this shit is. Also, apparently you can sit there and literally make-up e-mail addresses and vote 25 times per. What the fuck is the point of allowing this? So dumb. Good thing no one really gives a crap about the All-Star game anyway.
I found a site that had final vote tallies. All your facts are right about their starters. I think Brandon Crawford was ahead of Tulo by a million votes. Not sure what the ballot stuffing proves if you’re the SF brass, but I do hope the Giants have to pay Pablo and Melky contract bonuses as all-star starters so they feel some pain
But this doesn’t explain the millions of last minute votes. This just shows how retarded the voting system is. These guys probably created voting robots as well. I feel like the Giants organization encouraging this type of bullshit and being so open about it is so ridiculous. Next year i say we recruit someone to create a voting bot to vote all of the Mets into the starting lineup and make a complete mockery of the system.
San Fran held a vote-a-thon during a recent home game
The club invited 15 fans who had tweeted about how much they’ve been voting for Giants players to come to AT&T Park to a conference room that was decorated to be the “Campaign Headquarters,” where the participants were provided with computers to vote as many times as they could throughout Tuesday’s game.
“We wanted to take the chance to not only reward them, but ask them to help us,” Giants director of social media Bryan Srabian said. “We asked them to come in and spend the game voting. This is just all about our fans getting behind a special campaign like this. It’s exciting.”
“The 15 participants were provided food and other refreshments as they huddled over their respective computers, with the Giants-Dodgers game being shown on a projector screen. They used different e-mail addresses to vote as many times as they could for players like Buster Posey, who held a 216,452 vote advantage over the Cardinals’ Yadier Molina for the top spot for NL catchers as of Tuesday.”
just catching up to reading this…Vic, lets get this Mets voting robot going for next season so we get an all Mets team starting the Al-Star game at Citi Field. FUCK THIS! Mets fans can play this game too…!