All Star Voting Ends in 3 Days!

Voting for the AAA All Star game ends in just 3 days…

I remember last summer when the ticker counting down to the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until the 2010 AAA All Star game appeared in the concourse of Coca Cola Park. It had something like 400 + days to go when I first looked at it and now it is down to just a couple weeks!

With that, I do encourage you to vote. In this electronic age it is fairly easy to vote. You log in, it asks for a name and email address and you are allowed to vote a maximum of 25 votes. It makes it a whole lot easier to vote and I imagine to tally votes doing it this way. Imagine having to tally thousands of paper ballots? I’m surprised we haven’t seen more about fan voting in the local media. Maybe the papers are still stunned by the 1957 MLB All Star game fiasco?

In 1957 the All Star game was held in St. Louis and featured the American League vs. most of the Cincinatti Reds. Well that would have been the case if commisioner Ford Frick hadn’t stepped in and added Willie Mays and Hank Aaron to the roster.

When fan voting began that year, Cincinatti fans started voting. They voted, and voted and voted… then voted some more. To make things easier the local newspaper printed out ballots that were prefilled to vote for all of the Red’s team. To vote, a fan just had to sign their name and turn in the card. Fans were found to have collected hundreds of these ballots and even bars would refuse to serve anyone without casting a vote for the Reds. When tally day came around, 7 of the 9 starting positions were Cincinatti Reds. As a result, Frick took the vote away from fans and gave it to managers and players until the fan vote was restored in 1970. I wonder how many Cincinatti fans yelled out his name in anger following that decision…

Today’s system of combining fan votes, team votes and media votes seems to work pretty good. You get the prospects and the home team usually gets a few players on the roster who might not have made it otherwise.

So don’t forget to vote for your favorite players and before you know it it will be All Star weekend here in the Lehigh Valley!