The 2015 MLB All-Star Game is becoming a beautiful circus. As of right now, the Kansas City Royals are slotted to have eight—EIGHT—starters in the All-Star game after having a whopping zero since the year 2000. Royals fans are stuffing the online ballot boxes whether they have worthy players or not.
Here is the latest AL voting update for the #ASG: pic.twitter.com/9YMYBvIG2a
— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) June 15, 2015
This is the first year that the MLB moved all the All-Star voting to their website. The Washington Post revealed the Royals campaign that may have spurred the ridiculous number of votes for Royals players:
“Other teams were very good with engaging fans to get out the vote on paper ballots,” said Toby Cook, a Royals vice president and spokesman. “We weren’t particularly good at it. And frankly, we weren’t used to having more than one player either in contention or in the game. We could just work and work and work to promote the paper ballot, and it wouldn’t move the needle.
“The online comes along, and the crazy, wonderful fan base in Kansas City jumped on it. People kind of said, ‘I remember the Royals. That was a fun thing last year.’ It just really took off for us. We focused on saying, ‘This is really easy. You don’t have to come out to the ballpark. Go online and vote – and then vote again and vote again and vote again.”
The MLB’s system allows fans to vote up to 35 times, which allows a fervent fan base to vote in the second baseman with the worst on-base percentage in their respective league if they so desire. The online voting system may not be the only thing empowering the Royals fan base. A Detroit Tigers blogger from Bless You Boys found a way to hack into the MLB’s all-star voting system:
The key to exploiting the system was realizing that — are you ready for this? — there is zero verification surrounding the most important piece of information supplied in the voting process: your email address. The voting page asks you to supply an email address, along with some other information such as a birthdate, a zip code, and a favorite team, but unlike most systems that at least try to implement some form of security, MLB does not require you to validate your email address. There’s no confirmation email sent with a “click here to verify” or “use this five-digit verification code” message, some way of ensuring that the email address you supplied in the voting process is actually yours.
The baseball summer classic will be sure to draw some eyes if it’s basically the Royals vs the NL. If only a group of fans could use this power for something good, like voting Alex Rodriguez into the All-Star Game.
(Via Bless You Boys; Washington Post)
