All-Star Game votes for Royals are legit, baseball official says – Kansas City Star
Yes, Major League Baseball has received some bad All-Star Game ballots, about 60 million of the more than 300 million counted so far.
No, that doesn’t mean Omar Infante isn’t the leading vote-getter for the American League at second base, as reflected in the last vote totals released Monday.
Somehow, wires got crossed on Friday. Headlines popped up across the Internet, “MLB cancels over 60 million All-Star votes,” wrote one website. That was one of many.
And that was true, Bob Bowman, Major League Baseball’s president of business and media, confirmed to The Star on Friday. Baseball invalidates about 20 percent of the votes every year, and more than 300 million votes have been cast this year, the first in which the balloting is being conducted entirely online at MLB.com using email addresses.
“But no vote is being counted that was invalidated,” Bowman said.
As Bowman told The Star last week, Royals fans remain highly motivated. In three voting updates released by baseball, the Royals have gone from five (Salvador Perez, Mike Moustakas, Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain and Alex Gordon) to seven (Eric Hosmer and Kendrys Morales) to eight (Infante) of nine players voted atop their positions. Two more voting updates are scheduled for June 22 and 29, and the final results will be released July 5. Voting runs through 10:59 p.m. Central time July 2.
“The Royals remain active, very active,” Bowman said. “But other teams have awakened.”
Like the Indians, who have more actively campaigned for Jason Kipnis, and the Astros for Jose Altuve.
“We want fans engaged and highly energized,” Bowman said. “We hope the end result is great representation from both leagues to start the game.”
Royals manager Ned Yost, who will manage the American League All-Stars, now looks forward to the next vote count released by baseball.
“I’ve never really had a reason to look forward to Monday before,” Yost said. “The last couple of Mondays I’ve been looking forward to see how the guys are doing. I think it’s fun.
“Some fans can take their players for granted. Now that the nation is looking at this All-Star voting, we’ll see if other cities are going to get out the vote as much as our fans have.”
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