Major league baseball expert
Steve Cook returns to the Ultimate Sports Blog with his National League All-Star team. BATTER UP.......
Ah, the All-Star Game. People complain about how it's meaningless, but that was always the point. It didn't count in the standings. It was created so baseball fans could see the best players in the National League play the best players in the American League. In the days before interleague play, that was the only way we could see that happen outside of the World Series. It kind of lost some luster once interleague play began, but was still mostly inoffensive.
Until they had a tie.
Then people got mad. HOW DARE THIS GAME THAT DOESN'T COUNT FOR ANYTHING NOT HAVE A WINNER! To be fair, how the hell could both managers run out of players? Joe Torre was part of that fiasco, and he got inducted into the Hall of Fame as a manager! How can you be a Hall of Famer & run out of players? Anyway, people got mad & Bud Selig decided that the game had to have something on the line. Homefield advantage in the World Series. Before that, homefield switched back & forth between the NL & the AL. Simple. I like the idea of the team with the better record having it. Basing it on one game with a ton of people not employed by either team participating makes no sense. They might as well have it decided by the Home Run Derby.
I'm still excited about it, especially since I'll be getting paid to be there! It's gonna be a ton of work & an absolutely crazy scene for sure, but there's nothing like getting paid to be at a ballpark. Like the old saying goes, a bad day at the ballpark is still better than a good day just about anywhere else.
A lot of the fun of the All-Star Game is arguing over who deserves to get in. Of course, they've also made this worse. I remember going to Riverfront Stadium as a kid & being handed an All-Star Game ballot by the usher. You'd punch holes in the ballot next to the people you wanted in & turn the ballot in once you were done. It was part of the experience of attending a game, and when you think about it, fans that actually attend games deserve to do things like fill out All-Star ballots.
I asked Fan Accommodations where they were keeping the All-Star Game ballots this year, and I was told that they didn't have any! The voting was going to be online only. Now people can sit in their basements all day repeatedly voting for their favorite players & never leave the house. (Apparently leaving the house is not a very popular thing to do in Missouri.) You can vote 35 times per e-mail address, which means that your average Internet user can vote 350 times.
To me, this is a travesty. Fans that pay to attend games, or even get free tickets from somebody else & end up paying for other stuff while they're there, deserve to have their voices heard. I'm ok with online voting, there are many baseball fans that live nowhere near a stadium & are lucky to go to one game a year, but taking the paper ballot out of the mix is a step too far. Paper ballots are tradition, damn it.
There are other issues with the voting that we will discuss further in the next column. I have a tendency to ramble for awhile & I don't want to derail the main purpose of this piece. I've always wanted to do an All-Star voting column but never had the chance to until now. We're The Ultimate Sports Blog now, BAYBAY! That means I can write all I want about baseball, or basketball, or hockey, or NASCAR, or underwater basket weaving. Today I'm going to cast my ballot for the National League All-Star team!
Swingin' Stevie Cook's 2015 National League All-Star Team
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