I did my All Star voting last night. It wasn’t until I was checking out a few stats, that I realized a certain player on the O’s, not named Brian Roberts, deserves to be an All Star. More on that in a minute.
The current All Star voting process is a joke. Fan vote is a good thing. I like sending a ballot. I don’t like that fan vote makes 100% of determining who goes and who doesn’t and I don’t like that you can vote 25 times from each e-mail account. The voting process ends up being a glorified big league high school popularity contest that results in the name players and bulk of the rosters of the Red Sox and the Yankees getting the most of the votes. Good players on bad teams, smaller market teams, or play on the west coast get ignored in favor of name players.
A few examples:
Nate Clouth has 15 homers and 53 RBI, he’s 15th in NL OF voting. Ken Griffey Jr is 2nd and has 10 homers and 36 RBI.
6 of the 9 starting positions on the AL team, the vote leaders are either Yankees or Red Sox. If they’re not leading they’re in second place. Johnny Damon is 6th place overall for AL outfielders? Really? How? Coco Crisp is 13th overall…above 14th place Carl Crawford. Really. Coco isn’t even a regular starter on his team. I’m going to moan about Bobby Abreu, Kevin Youkalis, Dustin Pedoria, or Manny Ramirez getting votes. They’re having good season and deserve the votes. I didn’t vote for them, because there are plenty of other deserving players who don’t have the luxury of playing for the Sox or the Yanks.
When I did my voting, I didn’t vote for all Orioles. I don’t respect fans who vote for their entire starting roster. I’m a fan, but I don’t need to prove my fanhood by voting for Melvin Mora and Ramon Hernandez for the AL team.
I voted for Brian Roberts. The other Orioles I voted for was Aubrey Huff. At the start of the season, I couldn’t fathom any situation where I would be voting for Huff. But in terms of AL DH’s, he’s leading the pack. David Ortiz has been hurt for a large chunk of the season, so he’s got that going for him.
So far he’s got a total of 15 homers and 49 RBI. To put that into perspective, Huff had 15 homers all of last season. Over the first half of this season, Huff has been good. He leads in nearly offensive catagory for DH’s. The only one that he’s second in is homers and he’s only one behind Jim Thome on that one. Aubrey Huff was dead to me to start the season. He made those dumb comments about the city of Baltimore, but that really didn’t upset me too much. I thought it was dumb and classless, but I’m not a resident of Baltimore nor do I live anywhere close to Baltimore….meaning that I don’t having the civic pride many of you may. It doesn’t sting me as much as it might have you. It was still a dumb thing to say though. He was dead to me because…well, as I’m typing this he hits homer number 16… so he’s tied for first now with Thome. You go there, Aubrey. Anyways, before I was interupted by offensive power, Huff was dead to before the season because I wrote him off as another of the veteran players who get put out to pasture at Camden Yards. He wasn’t too good last year and I expected a bigger decline this season. So I’m over any will towards Aubrey Huff. He’s been booed and called a bunch of names. I’ve criticized him and jeered him in the comfort of my own home, but why boo and hate now that he’s doing what we had hoped that he would do when he sign with the O’s.
Filed under: Orioles
