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Detroit Tigers’ David Price: Not happy with fans voting for MLB All-Star Game

By Matt Pelc

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Many Detroit Tigers’ fans, and fans throughout baseball, have lamented the fact that seven of the nine positions for the American League All-Star squad are being led by Kansas City Royals.

You would think that, at least, one of the two non-Royals has to be Miguel Cabrera, right? Wrong. Miggy lost his slim lead in the latest MLB All-Star Game totals, released on Monday. He now trails Eric Hosmer by nearly 500,000 votes.

This has not set well with one of Cabrera’s teammates, who took to Twitter to voice his displeasure.

David Price will most likely be appearing in the All-Star game in about a month, so it is clear he wants the best players available as teammates. Certainly the Kansas City Royals are a good team, and are the defending AL Champions, but deserving of seven All-Star players? Hardly.

Eric Hosmer over Miguel Cabrera? Laughable.

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On the other hand, you gotta give up to the resolve of Royals’ fans who seemingly have nothing better to do than to vote 35 times from each email address they have, and create new ones just to continue to voting again and again and again. I mean all teams do it, even the Tigers, where they encourage their fans to vote early and often. #VoteTigers and all.

I am of the “who really cares” mind for the MLB All-Star game. I have talked in the past how I used to plan my summer around the Mid-Summer Classic when I was a child of the 1980’s, but today, it’s kinda–well–MEH. As I grew older and developed more interests, I didn’t care about it as much and it really bottomed out when Bud Selig decided to assign World Series home field advantage to the winner.  Which brings up the main point by Price.

If baseball is going to insist on having an exhibition game count in the standings, why continue to allow fan voting? Teams encourage fans to vote for straight tickets for the team, which means most Tigers’ fans are casting ballots for long-injured Victor Martinez at DH and Alex Avila at catcher, both of whom have averages hovering around .200.

Shouldn’t it be an actual best representation of real All-Stars and not team votes or a popularity contest?

Another great point by Price is Derek Jeter. Of course Jeter is in his first year of retirement and cannot play, but how many times have we seen players in the final years of their careers easily leading in the vote because of name recognition while they are having a very mundane season?

Message to baseball: You can’t have your cake and eat it to. Either continue fan voting and take away the home field reward or mothball fan voting and continue with the home field provision.

It is clear baseball, under new commissioner Rob Manfred, will continue to stay the course because something has to determine home field, right? We cannot go back to the days of simply rotating home field between AL and NL teams, right?

Again, my eternal question to baseball: why not have best record determine home field in the championship round like most other sports?

Logic and baseball often do not go hand-in-hand.

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