KC Royals Fans Broke All Star Voting in 2015

the weeks heading into the all-star game are always a contentious time for baseball fans there's always a few players that are snubbed during the fan voting period because some fan bases rally together to put their players in the all-star game that doesn't sound too bad but issues arise when fan bases overdo it that's what happened in 2015 with the kansas city royals but before we talk about them let's look at the concept of ballot stuffing and how it's evolved over the years the first notable instance of ballot stuffing ahead of the mlb all-star game was back in 1957 cincinnati red legs fans elected seven of their players to start the all-star game the only non-red leg player elected to start the game was stan usual so how did cincy fans accomplish this feat considering this was decades before the internet well fan voting was still fairly new only beginning 10 years earlier in 1947 the way ballots were given to fans was through a chosen newspaper in each city there would be blank ballots that people would take from the newspaper the newspaper chosen to represent cincinnati was the cincinnati times star what they decided to do was to print ballots marked with red legs players on the side making it easier to vote for them but this got out of hand pretty quickly other media outlets in the area including famous daytime tv pioneer ruth lyons told the public to send as many ballots as possible even team sponsor burger beer supplied ballots to local bars filling out a ballot would be a prerequisite for buying a drink at the bar kids would fill out ballots after finishing their homework when the commissioner's office counted the ballots they found more ballots were sent from cincinnati than all the other national league cities combined seven red legs were voted in but two of them would be replaced by hank aaron and willie mays as a result fans weren't allowed to vote for all stars until 1970. since then there have been a few other notable instances of ballot stuffing in 1999 a red sox fan made a program to vote for nomar garcia para 39 000 times the ballots were rejected but garcia para was deservedly an all-star this happened again in 2014 when a couple orioles fans sent 38 000 straight ticket orioles ballots in 2012 and 2013 giants fans were arguably the first fan base in the modern social media era to rally behind their team and stuff the online ballots now that we know the history of online ballot stuffing let's turn to the 2015 season despite the world series loss in 2014 kansas city royals fandom was reinvigorated prior to the 2013 season royals fans hadn't seen a winning record in a decade and they hadn't seen a playoff team since their 1985 championship team the last royals player to be voted into the all-star game was jermaine dye back in 2000 so with the city rejuvenated the fans were ready to see royals players back in the all-star starting lineup fan voting started at the end of april and royals fans went right to work at the beginning of june seven out of the nine american league starting spots had royals players leading the vote the only non-royals leaders were mike trout in the outfield and jose altuve at second base however omar and fonte was only 150 000 votes behind altuve let's consider how altuve and infante were performing at this point in the season altuve began may with an ops above 900 but a slump led to a less appealing stat line in early june but compare tuvase stat line to enfontes there's a clear difference here and well as you'd expect one week later enfonte was ahead of altuve the response by opposing fans and personnel was very mixed but the consensus from the royals was if you don't like it go and do something about it this statement had a little more weight than it may seem back in the 2014 world series the royals were the plucky underdogs who weren't predicted to be anywhere near as good as they were they played baseball a little differently instead of big hits they relied on small ball speed and defense and it worked they went on to prove their 2014 season was no fluke as they got off to a hot start in april 2015 winning their first seven games of the year however towards the end of the month something changed [Music] screaming at each other [Applause] [Music] throughout april 2015 for one reason or another the royals were involved in a few bench clearing altercations most notably with the oakland days after a hard slide by brett laurie injured alcita's escobar a slide that escobar himself called dirty since it was not a double play situation laurie apologized to escobar after the game and he also didn't realize it was not a double play situation at the time however the situation escalated as jordano ventura hit laurie and kelvin herrera nearly hit him during the series six royals players were ejected while no ace players were ejected at all it's also worth noting that through the first 16 games of the season royals players were hit 17 times to put this into perspective the rockies and diamondbacks were each hit 33 times as a team throughout the entire season mustachas gordon and kane combined for a higher season total by the end of the year in fact these three guys were hit much more in 2015 than 2014 the same can be said for basically the entire royals team how did the royals go from a plucky underdog in 2014 to one of the most hated teams in baseball in less than a year well this royal squad played baseball differently in more ways than one and the player to thank for all this is james shields he was brought to the team ahead of the 2013 season not only was he a leader in the clubhouse he taught the young players how to celebrate a win specifically with the use of a fog machine strobe lights and a bunch of water in 2014 the royals won 97 games between the regular season and postseason this ritual was performed after every win as a result this team's energy and swagger leaked from the clubhouse to the field however this was the pre-bautista batflip era despite this season being only six years ago the unwritten rules of celebration still applied let's look at some examples we only really need to look at the first series of the year royals versus white sox in the first game of the season after a double by alcita's escobar he looked towards his dugout and made a gesture uh okay in the third game of the series paulo orlando celebrated towards his dugout after hitting his first career hit alright in the second game of the series mike mustakas hit a double celebrated towards his dugout and on the very next pitch lorenzo kane was nearly hit okay i know what you're thinking these are tame celebrations if anything they're expected nowadays well back in 2015 they weren't as commonplace as they are today in the first game of the series jose abreu hit a home run he and his teammates showed very little emotion earlier in the game mustakas hit a home run and celebrated with his teammates outside the dugout and kane was hit in the very next at-bat notably by veteran pitcher jeff samarja another example in the second game tyler flowers hit a go-ahead three-run home run nothing later eric hosmer hit a go-ahead home run of his own completely different celebration yes the royals were playing at home but come on you would think the white sox would show some emotion especially against a division rival who were in the world series the year prior also in the third game after a hit by pitch that led to warnings the white sox drove in a run and nothing so were the royals being hit just for having fun well that's definitely one of the reasons it's worth noting that many of these brawls were instigated by royal's pitcher jordano ventura who tended to be a bit of a trash talker regardless this royals team was not only beating their opponents they were doing it in their own way as a result targets were placed on their backs so with this in mind it's no wonder why the royals players overwhelmingly led the all-star leaderboards the fanbase wanted to stick it to the rest of the league despite being one of the smallest markets in mlb their local tv ratings were the highest in the country it was the highest of any team through may since the 2007 red sox so while players like david price called the situation a joke royals personnel showed no sympathy it's worth noting that this was the first year that fan voting turned exclusively online so that's another reason why royals players were overwhelmingly being voted for would any of the ballots end up being discarded well mlb president of business and media bob bowman said that about 20 of the votes are being eliminated every year and that didn't change in 2015. by mid-june there were 300 million legitimate ballots while about 60 to 65 million had been discarded but the royals players kept on winning in the results in the end the royals had four players make the starting roster alex gordon lorenzo kane alcides escobar and salvador perez a total of seven royals would make the final roster including mike mustakas who won the final roster spot fan vote realistically the all-star game has always encouraged ballot stuffing when a team encourages their players to vote all of their players that's encouraging ballot stuffing the 2015 royals just happened to be a perfect storm of circumstances that united a rowdy fan base however it's not like you could consider every vote ethical or immorally right fans were able to vote 35 times all the ballot asked for was a name birthdate email address and a favorite team seems standard right and you have to expect that some devoted fans will make multiple emails to send in more ballots however some fans would use public email addresses of media members to send in ballots mlb said there were safeguards against these practices such as vote restrictions through ip addresses not only were these safeguards easy to bypass there was no authenticator for the emails which is how fans could use another person's public email to send in ballots there's a fine line between dedication and cheating the system i'm really excited about the all-star game this year this could be the best al team in years and with ned pushing all the buttons when we win the royals are going to get home field advantage when they go to the world series again you can go up in the right hand corner and actually open up a new incognito window and so when you lose that it basically loses like your history and all everything you've done in this window it doesn't record it so it can't tell that you've already used this email royals fans stuffed the ballots again in 2016 and cubs fans followed their lead in 2017. as we head into another all-star game i wonder if sometime in the future we're going to see this transpire again presumably mlb have taken steps to authenticate the voters to make sure this doesn't happen again that alone should make it harder for fans but who knows so what should we think of this whole ordeal well like i said it was the perfect storm a young defiant hungry team was on a quest towards glory their entire fan base was rejuvenated as they had a winning team to root for as the royals sought respect on the field the fans tried to claim that respect in the best way they could by sending their players to the all-star game this period of royals baseball is so fascinating to me it might deserve a video one day but for now let's reminisce on how fun this team was and the sheer absurdity of nearly seeing omar and fonte in the 2015 all-star game he ended his season with an ops plus of 48. that's all that needs to be said i hope you guys enjoyed the video leave a like if you did and subscribe for more content just like this thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: SportStorm

Views: 78,339

Keywords: kansas city royals, royals, kc royals, mlb, baseball, mlb all star game, mlb asg, all star game, all star game ballot stuffing, mlb all star game ballot stuffing, kansas city royals all star game, royals all star game, 2015 mlb all star game, 2015 all star game, 2015 royals all stars, 2015 kansas city royals all stars, 2015 all star game ballot stuffing, 2015 all star game royals ballot stuffing, royals ballot stuffing, sportstorm

Id: zh4mjXOUBFg

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/c792j770]

VOTE OMAR!