Fans need more input into All-Star Game
The 80th edition of the Midsummer Classic gave fans an unprecedented level of input into the game. Whereas voting was once reserved only for those fans who attended ballgames in person, MLB has now enfranchised millions of people all over the world via internet voting. And fans now decide bench players with the Sprint Final Vote and help determine the game’s most valuable player. Yet baseball needs to go further in its efforts to involve fans, who still lack full input into the game. Herein are some suggestions for improvement.
Increase the maximum number of online votes. If MLB is going to break voting records each year, as it did this year with 17.8 million online ballots, it’s not going to happen by limiting each fan to 25 votes. After smartly eschewing the democratic principle of one vote per person and enfranchising millions of foreigners, baseball just stopped at 25. Why stop at such an arbitrarily (and, quite honestly, low) number? Increment the maximum votes by one each year, with no cap.
Encourage campaigning. The Bran-Torino thing was an example of how exciting an organized campaign can be. Why not bring the great American pastime of campaign advertisements to the American pastime? Like our political elections, the All-Star Game simply didn’t get enough mediacoverage, including on the MLB.com site. If more deserving players miss out because they didn’t "get out the vote," that’s a small price to pay to experience the joy of campaign ads, especially in a non-election year. Besides, just think of the helpful attack ads we could see: Soundless images of Derek Jeter not quite getting to that ball up the middle with a menacing voice-over of "Do you really want Derek Jeter representing you? It’s time for change. Paid for Marco Scutaro."
Allow fans to not only determine who plays but how they play. Technology now allows us to fulfill Bill Veeck’s idea of allowing fans to participate in game decisions; MLB should leverage its online balloting to let fans vote on whether players should steal, bunt and play in certain spots in the field. Given enough computing power, MLB could even let fans decide which pitches a pitcher should throw and whether or not batters should swing or take. True, it would lengthen the game, but that simply means more advertising opportunities.
Expand rosters again. MLB moved in the right direction this year by expanding from 30- to 33 man-rosters, but they need to allow more in order to prevent some above-average players from being excluded. We suggest expanding each year by 10, capping the NL roster at 200 and the AL roster at 175. With each major-league team having 25 players, that means that the top 50% of players would be honored as all-stars.per side, or roughly 12 all-stars per NL team. That virtually ensures that all the above-average players are all-stars, which, after all, is the goal, right? Yes, Ryan Franklin and Zach Duke made the team this year, but if they hadn’t, Bud Selig would have had a travesty as big as the 2002 All-Star Game tie on his hands. Expanding to 200 would not have left this to chance.
Allow programmers to create automated voting scripts. Let’s face it: Regular balloting, manager picks and the venerable tradition of the 25th 30th 33rd-man Final Vote are insufficient to ensure that the voices of all constituencies are heard. How about a Hacker Vote? Once rosters expand to 200, MLB could invite programmers the world over to create automated scripts to manipulate vote totals for each team’s "201st man," or Garciaparra Man. And no holds are barred: Think of how fun the All-Star Game Selection Show Presented By Pepsi would be when viewers watch a player’s vote total not only going up, but going down, too.
Disenfranchise ballpark voters. Though at first the idea of taking the vote away from some fans would seem counterintuitive to the goal of greater fan input, fans who vote at actual ballparks tend to offset the internet and foreign vote, where MLB wants to expand. These provincial rubes who actually attend games when they could simply sit on their sofas and watch the games clearly don’t have the smarts to be electing all-star representatives, anyway. This constituency probably even stays the entire game, demonstrating that they possess an attention span that is too long for the kind of snap-judgment voting that can be assisted through web-site ads and email reminders. Abolish the ballpark vote, an idea that has obviously run its course. With the help of law-abiding voter-registration groups like ACORN, baseball should instead focus on bringing in new fans, especially underrepresented peoples who have never even seen a baseball game.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Ok, I’ll admit it. I didn’t catch on to the sarcasm until the ‘Expand Rosters Again’ section.
Well done, Pip.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Scratch that, maybe by the Scutaro joke.
At any rate, I should have noticed immediately.
Dangit Pip.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Thanks, Nick! Well-written satire, as you know, increasingly becomes more outlandish as it goes, so perhaps I didn’t put my “suggestions” in the right order.
I had fun with it; glad you liked it.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I would have been happy with some better non-game event producing. I watched a fair bit when I got off work in CA and was disappointed with the “polish” of the broadcast. A seemed like the camera work, audio and timing of a number of the non-game activities (e.g. Pujol’s home run try for a fan’s prize, Obama’s first pitch, random rushed video montages between activities, etc) were off or hastily thrown together.
Other than that, I was entertained.
July 21st, 2009 at 7:25 am
I was pretty sure at the start that it was a travshamockery, because I didn’t see Pip advocating for more votes. The rest of it just confirmed. This is what blogs were meant for!