With the American League All Star squad on pace to have eight of its nine starters coming from the same team, Major League Baseball may be deciding to reform the way its voting process for the game is conducted.
This season’s MLB All-Star Game is scheduled for July 12 at the Great American Ballpark, home of the Cincinnati Reds. On the secondary ticket market, MLB All-Star Game tickets have an average price of $1,058.41 and a get-in price of $333, according to TiqIQ.com. Fans looking to attend this year’s festivities can use Hipmunk.com for Cincinnati flights, along with hotels in Cincinnati that can be reserved. Hipmunk is any baseball fan’s No. 1 travel resource for the entire season.
Currently, eight members of the Kansas City Royals are in line to start in the All Star game, which determines home field advantage for the World Series. The Royals players in line to start include Salvador Perez, Alcides Escobar, Mike Moustakas, Alex Gordon, Lorenzo Cain, Omar Infante, Alex Rios and Kendrys Morales. Mike Trout from the Los Angeles Angels is the one non-Royal who occupies a starting spot due to his overwhelming popularity.
The largest complaints are for Infante and Gordon. Infante is batting .228 with 18 RBI (as of 6/19), and Gordon missed nearly two months of baseball due to an injury.
The positions are decided by fan voting, which has surpassed the 300-million mark this week. The MLB expects over a half-million votes to be in by the time voting closes. The deadline for voting is July 2, and each registered e-mail address is allowed to vote up to 35 times.
This is the first season All-Star voting has been done exclusively online. First-year commissioner Rob Manfred was quoted as saying, “”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.”
Today, CEO of MLB Advanced Media Bob Bowman announced Major League Baseball has canceled as many as 65 million All-Star votes over “concerns of improper voting.”
As the rest unfolds, it’ll be interesting to keep an eye out on the future of the All-Star Game voting process if these rosters stick.
