How Many All-Star Votes Did MLB’s Worst Players Get?
From SABR member Lewie Pollis at Beyond the Box Score on August 3:
One of my biggest pet peeves is incomplete data. So when the most complete All-Star vote totals were released last month with only the top eight players at each position (except for outfield, where the top 24 were released) listed … I felt like I was missing something.
I understand why the process isn’t fully transparent—no one who has a say in it has anything to gain by revealing who the least popular players in the league are and how little support they got—but it’s frustrating not knowing how many people wanted Adam Dunn and Kendrys Morales to play in the Midsummer Classic even though the former had been a terrible-hitting DH and the latter had missed the entire first half of the season.
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We know that fans cast 32.5 million ballots, but we don’t know how many votes each balloter submitted. Simply multiplying 32.5 ballots times 17 positions doesn’t work, because not everyone votes for every spot. … To illustrate just how prevalent incomplete ballots are, the top 136 vote-getters combined for 310,830,344 votes—an average of just under 9.6 votes per ballot. Given the incredibly unequal distribution of All-Star votes, that the best 54% of players got only 56% of possible votes makes it clear that the average voter didn’t come anywhere close to filling out his or her ballot in full.
Read the full article here: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/8/3/2307335/how-many-all-star-votes-did-mlbs-worst-players-get
Originally published: August 5, 2011. Last Updated: August 5, 2011.