Major League Baseball released the fourth American League voting update for the 2015 All-Star Game earlier this week. In the previous update, seven Kansas City Royals were slated to start this year's event. The latest update has eight Royals in the starting lineup for the AL.
The fan voting has caused a ton of controversy this year, putting yet another issue on the agenda for Rob Manfred in his first year as commissioner of the MLB. If the voting were to end today, Salvador Perez (C), Eric Hosmer (1B), Omar Infante (2B), Mike Moustakas (3B), Alcides Escobar (SS), Kendrys Morales (DH), Lorenzo Cain (OF) and Alex Gordon (OF) would be the eight starting Royals.
Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout (OF) would join them.
Fans have the opportunity to vote up to 35 times, and the fact anyone can create multiple email accounts for the sake of filling out more ballots has allowed Royals fans to absolutely dominate the system. The voting ends on July 2, which now has many criticizing the voting process because it's quite clear the entire Royals' roster is not worthy of an All-Star Game bid.
Manfred addressed the subject at Fenway Park during yesterday's game between the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves.
"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," he said, via ESPN. "What I would say is I hope over time that what people come to think about the commissioner's office is when we have a situation such as this -- this is one example -- that we are responsive and open to change if in fact it appears we get a result that is not consistent with the goals of the system that is currently in place."
Royals' manager Ned Yost doesn't see a problem with the voting and he thinks if other fans are upset about the whole thing then they should go out and vote to get the players they want in the All-Star Game.
Sure, that's easy for anyone to say. But who wants to spend that much time to manipulate the system to watch their team's players participate in the All-Star Game? The fans who vote have a duty to elect those who they feel are among the best in the MLB, not players such as Hosmer and Infante, to name a few.
Hosmer is leading Miguel Cabrera by nearly a half million votes, and yet Cabrera leads the American League in batting average (.345), on-base percentage (.449), slugging percentage (.594) and OPS (1.043), to go along with 14 home runs and 48 RBIs. Hosmer is certainly having a good season (.294/.363/.461/.824 with seven home runs and 37 RBIs), but nowhere is it comparable to Cabrera's campaign
Infante's situation is the most shocking of all. He's batting .221/.229/.307/.536 with 17 runs scored and 17 RBIs on the year. He has the worst OPS in the MLB and is among the worst in nearly all hitting categories. Yet he leads Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve by over 300,000 votes.
There will be two more updates (June 22 and June 29) before the voting process ends. And at this point it's very realistic the overwhelming majority of the American League team is made up of Kansas City Royals players, which may force Manfred to amend the voting system from this point on.
