All Star Game Selection Sunday

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Baseball Tonight held the All Star selection show sponsored by eSurance live from Nationals Park in Washington before tonight’s ESPN Sunday Night Baseball telecast between the Giants and Nationals. Here are a few notes from the show:

  • The first selection they announced was Bryce Harper. It’s clear ESPN has a good relationship with Harper and want to make him a star. I didn’t realize that he wasn’t baseball’s leading vote getter, he just led the NL. We voted one time. Harper had 13.9 million votes.
  • Josh Donaldson was the leading vote-getter in all of baseball and probably deservedly so with no one at his position to pull votes from him.
  • There were over six billion votes, destroying the previous high total in any year which was 3.2 billion. I miss the paper ballots, but it’s clear we have moved to an online world.
  • Alex Gordon, Alcides Escobar, Salvador Perez, and Lorenzo Cain were voted in as Royals starters.
  • The only other team to place multiple starters on either roster was the Miami Marlins with Dee Gordon and Giancarlo Stanton getting enough of the vote to be elected.
  • Mike Trout, Paul Goldschmidt, and Miguel Cabrera were voted in.
  • Matt Holliday who is a solid player; but has been injured for half of the year is probably the only guy you could label undeserving.

The remainder of the rosters get filled out tomorrow night. Baseball is making this a multiple night spectacle, as they should.