Lars The Wanderer said:With all those Royals starting, Bochy should name Bumgarner the NL starting pitcher.
moondog80 said:Six of these are at least defensible selections. But Escobar is bad (255/285/341) is bad, and has an enormous lead. And Infante (204/213/283) might be the worst selection ever; I'll bet Altuve catches him though.
HillysLastWalk said:How are the Royals fans able to do this? Sure, they are stuffing the ballot box, I get that, but was there some type of effort or marketing involved that just worked here? Otherwise every year, the team with the largest attendance before the voting ends could also get something like 8 of their players on the team. But I don't recall this ever happening before (or recently, or to the extent we see here).
No stadium voting. It's all online I believeGdiguy said:
The thing is that most fans don't really care, and at the stadium you can basically vote infinitely (it's not like they stamp your hand with each ballot you put it).
The danger for MLB is that there's a snowball effect here - as soon as it became clear that it was somewhat succeeding, even more Royals fan joined in, which made the voting ramp up even faster, which then encourages even more fans to join in (and conversely makes fans of other teams not really care as much)... and if you can get 30k people at a game to each put 10 ballots in you can build a huge lead really fast.
Now, I guess it's possible that there's some Royals fan that figured out how to punch 10k ballots at once or something, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's legitimate.
moondog80 said:Six of these are at least defensible selections. But Escobar is bad (255/285/341) is bad, and has an enormous lead. And Infante (204/213/283) might be the worst selection ever; I'll bet Altuve catches him though.
Snodgrass'Muff said:I know Red Sox fans are disenfranchised right now, and that in the end, an All Star game appearance isn't THAT important, but how is Xander Bogaerts not in the top 5 in voting? He's third in wRC+ in the AL and neither Semien nor Miller have much of a lead on him (both at 106), he leads in OBP, and is tied for the lead in wOBA. There is no objective measure by which you can make a credible claim that he's not a top 5 shortstop in the AL right now.
soxhop411 said:No stadium voting. It's all online I believe
jmm57 said:This could actually be great news. I can't imagine 8 Royals starting the game is going to be good for ratings, so MLB might just be forced to do away with fan voting.
LOL didn't realize how bad it actually was...Infante is "hitting" .204/.213/.283
moondog80 said:Six of these are at least defensible selections. But Escobar is bad (255/285/341) is bad, and has an enormous lead. And Infante (204/213/283) might be the worst selection ever; I'll bet Altuve catches him though.
Gdiguy said:
Wow, really? Huh, my mistake - I guess it's been longer than I thought since I've been to a game around all star voting time.
caminante11 said:So is this all new this year?
-- No All star ballots in the stadiums
-- Default is to vote for only players on your favorite teams
If Royals win nearly all positions, maybe they will change the second one for next time.
What a joke!