MLB is eliminating paper All-Star ballots and our childhood weeps
When the news broke Tuesday that MLB would be getting rid of its paper All-Star ballots starting with the 2015 season, I was momentarily transported to being a 10-year-old kid sitting inside Oakland Coliseum with a pencil in my hand.
As Bloomberg reports, MLB told clubs last week in an internal memo that paper All-Star ballots were going away, since the lo-fi ballots fans use at ballparks have been lapped multiple times by digital votes. MLB can now “go green” while also pushing more people to its website.
The rational makes sense — this is the digital era, after all. We don’t need paper All-Star ballots anymore than we need compact discs to listen to music or an actual map to figure out where we’re going. Heck, there’s a hashtag contest now to figure out which players will be the final All-Stars on each squad. Imagine explaining hashtag All-Star voting to my 10-year-old self, way back in 1989.
But oh, to be 10. My cousin and I would sit there, under the sun, with our peanuts or malts, poking out the tiny baseball next to the name of our favorite players. There was a lot of deciding to do. I didn’t just vote for the A’s. I took it much more serious than that. I knew all these players’ names and stats. I had their baseball cards and would see many of them when they came to play the A’s, so I tried to be fair. I always figured it was a great endorsement when I deemed a player from a different team worthy of a vote. Congrats, Bo Jackson.
[On Flickr: Every MLB All-Star ballot from 1970-2013.]
Picking up an All-Star ballot was a wonderful part of going to the game. It wasn’t just another thing to do while I was at the stadium, but a moment in which I felt like I was participating, a moment that brought me closer to the first sport I loved. As we get older and more cynical, we know that’s not necessarily the case — the All-Star machine is bigger than one kid and one ballot, but hey, there’s a certain joy to being young and dumb.
Getting older means being more prudent, so there are a number of completely understandable and worthwhile reasons for MLB to make this move, yet my childhood still weeps:
• Online voting accounted for 80 percent of the ballots cast last season, according to Bloomberg.
• More than 16 million ballots placed in ballparks went unused in 2014.
• Every other major sport in the U.S. is already all-digital for its All-Star voting.
But baseball isn’t every other sport, so that’s probably why it held out a bit longer. These activities — just like the dot races and sing-alongs and mascot stunts — are a part of our game. How many people have fond memories of themselves filling out a Pro Bowl ballot as a kid at an NFL game? Exactly. How many people even care who makes the Pro Bowl?
The kids today, well, this change won’t bother them much. Most of them don’t know the joy that comes from buying a new CD and clicking it into a Discman while reading the liner notes. Just like they haven’t spent years going to the ballpark, sitting there on a sunny day with a pencil in hand, giving the stars on the field the most powerful endorsement a 10-year-old can give.
They can do that online now. They won’t miss the paper ballot. But I sure will.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
