All-star vote messy, tainted and still popular with fans
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Major League Baseball was hip to the whole hanging-chad problem long before it became a national focus in last year's presidential circus. But the folks in Florida are lucky they didn't have to deal with any of the grave condiment issues that confront baseball's All-Star vote counters on a daily basis.
"We get ballots you wouldn't believe," said Jeff Gehl, president and CEO of Big Ballot Inc., the company that has conducted baseball's All-Star voting process for 25 years. "We get ballots with ketchup and mustard, ballots with Mickey Mouse, Jim Beam and Elvis Presley as write-ins, ballots written by kids that look like connect-the-dots. You have to make a determination what is legitimate. That's why the league turns to us."
With nearly 80 millions ballots distributed in seven countries and in four languages - on paper and online, at ballparks and retail outlets - the voting to determine the starting lineup in the July 10 All-Star Game at Safeco Field is the largest voter participation program in the U.S. outside national elections. But the institution would make Thomas Jefferson cringe.
The time-honored American tradition of "one-man, one-vote" is hardly the guiding principle. More like, "One man, 25 votes, unless you can get away with more." Twenty-five is the number of Internet votes that are allowed per person, based on the number of games that ballots are available for fans to fill out at each stadium. Though Big Ballot has safeguards to prevent blatant ballot-box stuffing, it's no secret that fans vote early and often for their favorites, often with the tacit (or blatant) encouragement and support of the home team.
"The numbers are so great, as far as the total return, that 20 from one person is not going to skew things," said Gehl.
The fans have determined the starters since 1970, when commissioner Bowie Kuhn restored the honor that had been ingloriously stripped from Joe and Josephine Fan in 1957 by commissioner Ford Frick after a voting scandal in Cincinnati that resulted in seven Redlegs getting elected to the starting lineup.
Of course, there have been enough dubious results over the years to cause critics to howl that fans don't deserve the privilege. It took a long time to live down the election of 1989, when Mike Schmidt and Jose Canseco were both voted to the starting lineup.
That would have been perfectly acceptable if Schmidt hadn't retired in May, and Canseco hadn't spent the entire season on the disabled list with a wrist injury. (Schmidt suited up to take a bow but didn't play; Canseco wanted to play but the A's didn't allow him to).
Ken Griffey Jr., hitless until last week in '01 but fewer than 5,000 votes out of a starting outfield spot, could be poised to join the list of outrageous All-Star selections. Cleveland's Sandy Alomar won the American League's catching job in 1991 despite an injury that kept him out most of the season. In 1985, the Mets' Darryl Strawberry missed seven weeks with a broken thumb and still won a starting spot. In 1980, the Dodgers' Davey Lopes was elected NL starter at second base despite a .214 average. One year, Paul Molitor was voted the AL's second baseman despite not playing a game at the position. Oakland catcher Terry Steinbach was voted AL catcher in 1988 despite a .217 average - and then vindicated voters with a home run and two RBI to win the game's MVP award.
The tenure of fan voting was established in 1933, when an out-of-shape, 38-year-old Yankee outfielder was selected to start in the very first mid-summer classic. That the outfielder in question was Babe Ruth is the first of many examples of fans' nearly blind loyalty to superstar players. Never mind if those superstars have ceased being productive. Current case in point: Struggling Cal Ripken Jr. seems on the way to winning his record 17th starting berth.
Gehl, whose company also supervises the balloting in the NBA, NASCAR and various TV awards shows, staunchly defends the will of the people.
"Baseball voting is subject to a great deal of skepticism from purists who say it's nothing but a popularity contest," he said. "But if you look over time, the results match pretty closely with the leaders in major statistical categories. In general, fans vote for the best players. It just so happens that the best players are the ones who get the most media attention and are generally the most popular."
In 1999, the baseball voting public got a scholarly nod from researchers Andrew Hansen and Torben Andersen, who determined in an exhaustive study published in "Economic Inquiry" that racial discrimination in voting declined noticeably after 1979, to the point that in 1996 "the best black players were more likely to be among the top vote getters for a given level of performance."
Richard Smolka, a retired professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C., and for 31 years editor of the election-industry newsletter, "Election Administration Reports," has been fascinated for years by baseball's voting system. However, in 1999, he was denied in his request to observe the process.
"For counting votes, it's an incredible operation, but it's also a deep mystery," he said. "This country presumably needs a voting system, and it's still a secret. The number of ballots they count is bigger than any jurisdiction in the U.S., and the speed they count them is incredibly fast."
Which brings us back to the whole hanging-chad issue. Florida might have saved itself some embarrassment if it were using the state-of-the-art machinery that baseball employs to count its millions of punched-out ballots (approximately half the printed ballots use chads, the other half being "fill in the bubble.").
"We've actually been dealing with dimpled and hanging chads for a long time," Gehl said. "But they (Florida election officials) invented chads I'd never heard of before, and I've been in the business 25 years."
Gehl says his company uses "a new generation of intelligent scanning technology that captures light passing through holes. The old technology doesn't catch that. We're able to identify intended votes and unintended votes. We still get ones that are pregnant chads or hanging, and then there's a manual process to determine the vote."
Though Gehl won't go into much detail, Big Ballot claims to have the means to catch Internet hackers trying to inundate the on-line voting lines with support for one candidate. Chris Nandor, a 25-year-old hacker from Carver, Mass., was busted twice in 1999 trying to mass-vote for the Red Sox's Nomar Garciaparra. The first time, 14,702 votes were rejected, and the second time 25,259 votes were thrown out.
"Basically, we're looking for anomalies, a disproportionate number of votes for a candidate on a particular day," he said. "If Garciaparra is getting 7,500 votes a day online and one day he gets 30,000, that shows up."
They also have ways to ferret out printed ballots that have been mass punched. In 1993, thousands of ballots from Colorado for Andres Galarraga were invalidated after it was determined they had been mass-punched.
One of the more bizarre ballot-stuffing incidents was apparently conducted by none other than Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey, who in 1974 become one of just two players to win a starting position as a write-in candidate (Braves outfielder Rico Carty was the other in 1970).
In her 1989 book, "The Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey," the first baseman's ex-wife revealed that it wasn't just his devoted fans that got Garvey elected. She tells of Steve and a friend identified as "Weyland" orchestrating the write-in campaign.
"During (Weyland's) visits to Dodger Stadium, he became friendly with the people who worked in the team office," Cyndy wrote. "He convinced somebody there to give him whole cartons of ballots. He took them back to our house, and we set up an assembly line. For the next month or so, we filled out All-Star ballots. Thousands and thousands of them. For hours and hours.
"Steve punched. Weyland punched. In the beginning, I punched. We made sure that his name was written in different ways, with different pens. I was pregnant, and after a while, I got tired of punching. I only came around once in a while to vacuum up the thousands of punched-out squares that went flying into every corner of the house."
The current balloting system is better, unquestionably, than was used in the early years of All-Star voting, when the Chicago Tribune supervised the balloting. The late Jim Segreti, a sports makeup editor, was in charge of counting the votes. According to Tribune legend, when Segreti was too busy to count, he'd weigh the ballots.
"He'd take a pile in his hand and say something like, `Two thousand for DiMaggio,' " Bernie Colbeck, the Tribune's longtime chief sports clerk, told the Orange County Register in 1989.
Perhaps because of such dubious mechanics, All-Star selection was given to the managers from 1937-46, and then turned back to fans from 1947-57.
In '57, Reds management arranged for a local newspaper to pre-print the names of Reds players on the ballots. The only one omitted was first baseman George Crowe, out of deference for Stan Musial, who was playing first for the Cardinals that year.
Seven Reds were elected - second baseman Johnny Temple, shortstop Roy McMillan, third baseman Don Hoak, catcher Ed Bailey, and outfielders Frank Robinson, Wally Post and Gus Bell. Commissioner Frick ordered Hank Aaron and Willie Mays into the NL lineup, replacing Bell and Post.
Though the scandal led Frick to give All-Star selection to managers, players and coaches in 1958, Cincinnati GM Gabe Paul always claimed the Reds fans were unfairly singled out. He said he orchestrated the mass balloting himself.
"Every move we made was checked with the commissioner's office," Paul told The Associated Press in a 1988 interview. "We got the OK for everything. The town really got behind it. The commissioner's office never anticipated what happened."
Kuhn decided in 1970 that 12 years of penance was enough and gave voting back to the fans. "There would be some howls, but fan voting made too much marketing sense to ignore," Kuhn wrote in his 1987 autobiography, "Hardball."
"As I saw it, this was still a game for the fans," Kuhn continued. "We should not tell them whether or not to select players with hot starts that season, big years the previous years, or great careers. It was their game and each fan could decide what the criteria should be."
Occasionally, players have rebelled over the outcome of that criteria. In 1979, Cardinals shortstop Garry Templeton was passed over by voters in a season in which he was en route to 100-plus hits from both sides of the plate, and uttered the immortal words, "If I ain't startin'; I ain't departin'."
That sentiment was mimicked a decade later by Kevin Mitchell, who defiantly told reporters the year after his MVP award, when he trailed in the balloting, "I ain't nobody's backup."
Two years ago, the Texas Rangers' Juan Gonzalez, upset at being left out of the starting outfield the year after his MVP award, announced that he would not accept a reserve spot on the team and was passed over.
Even though the winners serve just one day, this is an election that means something.