Monday, June 21, 2010
VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN.
Update! We have Cubs, Twins and now Angels fans on board with the voting trade!
Ladies and gentlemen of the Mets fan sphere, this is a disgrace. David Wright coming in at #2 for All Star Voting? Behind Placido Polanco? Really? You really want to see Placido effing Polanco start the All Star Game at third base? Do you truly believe this is an accurate estimation of performance, or is it just a reflection of the fact that Phillies fans possess opposable thumbs that allow them to easily punch out those little circles in the All Star Game ballots inbetween throwing up on other fans and letting their children consume alcohol at games? Of course you do.
It is time to take drastic action. So, here is what I propose. Please, after the jump.
I propose a voting trade. I propose that we, Mets fans, actively campaign teams who do not have a viable third base candidate on the ballot and offer to trade our votes for theirs. For example, Julie at Cubs blog A League Of Her Own is perfectly willing to trade David Wright votes if we vote for Marlon Byrd. So, people, get clicking. (No seriously, we talked about it on the podcast today.)
Additionally, the excellent Angels blog True Grich has gotten on board; our Torii Hunter votes in exchange for David Wright. (He was originally voting for Scott Rolen but then agreed to throw his votes to DW when it was pointed out that the alternative was Placido Polanco.)
It’s official: Julie announced it today!
Sarah over at Twins blog Oh, it’s THOSE Girls is on board with the proposal. They are looking for AL voting love for Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau because (and I quote): “I don’t trust the Yankees fans not to have a last minute surge for stupid Teixeira.” I believe that is a sentiment that any red-blooded Mets fan can get behind.
Additionally, I want to campaign any AL fans to give us their votes for David Wright in turn for our votes for anyone they want us to. It’s the AL - do you really want to see the Yankees dominating? Don’t they do that enough already without anyone’s help? Do you want some idiot in the middle of the country who doesn’t know anything about baseball to just vote for the players they’ve seen on Sunday Night Baseball and ignore the rest of the league? So attention Red Sox, Twins, Mariners or Rangers bloggers: we are willing to trade our AL votes for your pro-David Wright NL clicks to help your guys. If you are a blogger for any AL team that needs a little extra voting help, drop a line! I will happily feature your requests here.
DISCLAIMER: Trust me, I think it’s dumb: what is the point of 25 votes per email address, except to increase pageviews for MLB.com, which means $$$? It’s pointless. I would rather see the players vote, it would be far more interesting to me. And I was all set to completely ignore All Star Game voting this year until I heard about this debacle. Placido Polanco cannot possibly start over David Wright. There is no way this makes any sense.
Vote early, vote often!
DAVID WRIGHT FOR ASG
Ugh. Since I’m a big fan of the blog, I’ll try to comply with your request. I think I’m in full agreement with you regarding the state of the ASG, the voting, and all that malarkey (listened to the podcast). I grew tired of the on-line voting debacle a few years back after Mike Lowell beat out Carlos Beltran for defensive player of the year (in some goofy fan-voted award) and Corey Hart beat out David Wright in the ASG final pick. I hate the fan voting coupled with the fact that the game means something. If it’s a popularity contest, let it be an exhibition game. If it means something, let the players and coaches who know better select the best candidates for the team. Anyway, enough about that…
Since I am an engineer, I cannot avoid mental math exercises… Wright is about 200,000 votes shy of the lead and will probably need more since everyone is still voting. We have about 10 days of voting time left. You theoretically get 25 votes per e-mail per day (but I think you can get more if you rotate or have multiple computers - I think it’s blocked by cookies on your own system, but I’m not sure). I could use 3 or 4 e-mail addresses per day, so I’ll give myself 75 votes/day. If I keep up the torrid voting pace every day (not likely), I will get 750 votes in for DW. To make up 200,000, you need 267 people to do the same (and more to make up for the additional votes PP will get in the same time period). I suppose that’s a manageable request. What’s the traffic on your site? :-)