The balloting is finally in, and we have our complete rosters for the National and American leagues.
In case you’re not a baseball fan, balloting was conducted online at at ballparks; fans chose the starting lineups for each team. The managers of each team (Bob Brenly for the NL, Joe Torre from the AL - it’s the managers of last year’s World Series teams) pick the reserves and the pitching staff.
This year, a new wrinkle. The “30th man” - the last guy on each roster - was also selected via Internet voting.
I don’t mean to debate this year’s rosters. I’d like to take a look at how they’re put together, though.
Is the current system okay the way it is? Can it be improved at all? Is it best to leave it as it is, imperfect but acceptable?
The way I see it, four main groups can select the rosters:
- The Fans
- The Commish
- The Managers of the two teams
- The Sportswriters
Now, the fans do it now, and overall they do a pretty fair job. But the problem is that the voters aren’t just diehard fans; they’re also just-stopping-by fans, fairweather fans. They go to the park maybe once a year to see a game, and they get one or more of these ballots to fill out. So they punch out the names of the guys they recognize, or the players from their favorite team, or guys whose name begins with “S”, or something like that. Now, certainly this doesn’t apply to a lot of the voters - but there have been numerous years in which a player who had missed much of the first half of the season was voted to start in the All-Star game. Players have been voted in even when they were having subpar seasons, simply because they were popular with the fans. To me, that’s not terribly impartial.
The Commissioner, of course, would be a poor choice because of current public opinion of him - he’s reviled by a lot of people. Sio no, I’d have to say B. Selig wouldn’t be a good choice. But even if he were not the Commish, I’m not sure the office would be all that impartial, either. So I say nay to this choice, too.
Then there are the two managers, who already choose the reserves and pitching staff. But the recent controversy - ok, so it happens almost every year - is that the managers pick a lot of players from their own team. I think New York and Arizona have 5-6 players each. Even if their players were very deserving, this might still make it look like favortism.
And finally, there’s the sportswriters. So let me try this plan out on you guys. (There are plenty of guys on here who know more about baseball than I do.)
What if, say, 1 sportswriter was taken from each team’s city (2 each from NY and Chi), for a total of 30 writers. Then an additional 5-10 were taken from print and electronic media who were either national writers (your Gammons, your Reilly) or were from newspapers in towns that didn’t have a baseball team.
So that’d give you 40 guys. Ok, so maybe that’s a lot. But they’d be voting from the first day of the season, one vote per person.
These guys would vote for the starting lineups, then the reserves, then the pitching staff.
Now, one can certainly argue that this is the fan’s game. Ok, I’ll grant you that. But isn’t it in the best interests of the game itself for the best players of the year to be playing? Is it really the best game when washed-up players get another shot at an All-Star appearance when they don’t really warrant it for that season?
In my opinion, sportswriters generally have the best interests of the game at heart. These are the guys who vote players into the Hall of Fame, and that process, while flawed, is still a pretty sound one. You don’t hear many cries to remove players from the Hall, but you frequently hear cries that Player A should never have been in the All-Star game.
Thoughts?
Current system good? Or can be improved?
The fact is, although fans want to see stars, I find it difficult to believe that that’s all they care about. I think actual baseball fans are smarter than that. If only true-blue baseball fans voted, we’d probably have more-legitimate all-stars.