Kansas City Royals second baseman Omar Infante is hitting a paltry .228 with zero home runs and 18 RBI with an on-base plus slugging (OPS) percentage of .548, the second-to-last among all qualified hitters in baseball. Yet, he's projected to being an American League starter for the 2015 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
In fact, Infante is one of eight Royals players projected to being starters for the AL squad. Something is definitely wrong with this picture...and online voting guidelines are definitely to blame for it. The MLB realized that and announced Friday that it has wiped out more than 60 million improper votes, according to Yahoo Sports.
Part of the problem is the MLB allows each fan to vote up to 35 times for the game, but a simple addition of a new email address would allow that same fan to vote 35 more times online, making final numbers haywire. Not to say that the Royals don't have a rabid fan base, but they are the 25th-sized market in the MLB.
Yes, Royals' Eric Hosmer is one of the best young first basemen, but should he really be leading Miguel Cabrera by nearly half a million votes, when Cabrera is threatening for another triple crown this season? Part of the All-Star Game is always popularity, but how much should be tolerated here? Especially if it's illegal votes.
Each year around this time, the MLB kills 20 percent of its votes for improper voting. This year, the MLB is expected to break its record total of 390 million received votes.
"I'm not saying we bat 1.000," Bob Bowman, the CEO of MLB Advanced Media, told Yahoo Sports. "But it's between 60 and 65 million votes that have been canceled. We don't really trumpet it because if someone thinks they're getting away with it, they'll try to again."
"We scrubbed these first set of numbers incredibly thoroughly," Bowman added. "We said, 'Can this possibly be right? Look at all these votes for Kansas City.' It just didn't turn out that way."
There's got to be some kind of automatic voting mechanism in place here that let the Royals rack up their stars, taking eight of nine possible starting spots. We'll see where they stand, when the final votes are tallied.
The MLB All-Star Game will be played at at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati on July 14.
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