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FREEP Bud Selig, Vote For Twins And Expos For The MLB All-Star Game (My Title)
USA Today Baseball Weekly ^ | 5/29/02 | Paul White

Posted on 05/31/2002 6:52:12 PM PDT by Mean Spirited Conservative

Edited on 04/13/2004 1:39:37 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

Contraction talk and labor issues ruining your enjoyment of baseball? Would you like to vent?

Paul White urges you to send MLB and the players a message by voting the players from the two teams slated for contraction into the All-Star Game starting lineup. That's right, click your mouse or punch your chad for those Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos.


(Excerpt) Read more at usatoday.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
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This is a great idea. Imagine what the FREEPER community could accomplish. We could help save two baseball franchises. And like Chicago DemocRats we're allowed to cast multiple votes!
1 posted on 05/31/2002 6:52:12 PM PDT by Mean Spirited Conservative
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To: Blues Duke; Charles Henrickson
The *pingy* thingy
2 posted on 05/31/2002 7:05:58 PM PDT by hole_n_one
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To: Mean Spirited Conservative
Hearts are in the right place but beware the method doing more damage than good. Technically, it is called ballot-box stuffing...and it was done once before. For the 1956 game, Ohio fans - pushed incessantly by newspapers, radio, and team management - stuffed the ballot box for the Cincinnati Reds: eight Reds got voted onto the starting lineup for the game; then-Commissioner Ford Frick stepped in, invalidated the vote, but allowed two of the Reds to stay in the starting lineup without tossing the other eight off the team entirely. The irony: One of the two Reds allowed to stay in the starting lineup is the current Montreal Expos manager, Frank Robinson.

I bear no love or sympathy for Bug Selig, but I would not put it past him to decide it was in the best interest of the game that the fans should lose the All-Star voting once again, and on similar ballot-box stuffing grounds, should the idea (probably a long-enough shot) succeed.
3 posted on 05/31/2002 7:11:57 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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To: BluesDuke
If you go to MLB.com you can vote for the all-star game and it explicitly states that you can vote up to 25 times. Now if every Freeper took this opportunity we could field a team of Expos and a team of Twins for the mid-summer classic!
4 posted on 06/04/2002 12:43:37 PM PDT by Mean Spirited Conservative
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To: Mean Spirited Conservative
If you go to MLB.com you can vote for the all-star game and it explicitly states that you can vote up to 25 times. Now if every Freeper took this opportunity we could field a team of Expos and a team of Twins for the mid-summer classic!

I know of the 25-vote allowance - but my position does not change (and not just because it seems now that the Twins are to be spared, poor Bug Selig!). Even with the 25-vote allowance it would still be deemed ballot-box stuffing, assuming it succeeded.
If I know nothing else about the governors of baseball, I know that in their cavalier hands the rules practically are that there ain't no rules, when they inconvenience said governors. (If there were, the reserve clause could not possibly have been willfully misconstrued and abused as it was for all those years until it was finally and mercifully thrown the hell out...and the umpires would not be able to construe the strike zone the way too damn many judges - and elected representatives, for that matter - construe the Constitution. Just to name two examples.)

And considering what a thoroughgoing horse's ass Bug Selig has proven to be, it would be entirely in character for him - on the extremely outside chance that the vote could produce starting All-Star lineups of Twins versus Expos strictly - to declare that, since obviously even a generous voting allowance did not prevent the vote's corruption, it is just as obvious that another means of selecting the All-Star Game's competition will just have to be found because now twice in baseball history has it been shown that it is too simple to corrupt the fans' vote.

But it wouldn't matter if every registered FREEPer availed themselves of 25 votes to stuff the ballot box. The All-Star voting is well enough underway that it would require every American citizen plus the voter rolls (dead and alive) of Chicago to overcome the tally even now and put Twins and Expos exclusively on the teams. (I hope I don't have to remind anyone that pulling a stunt like this, even with the 25-votes-allowed condition, just might reflect against our own integrity - hypocrisy charges, anyone? If we multi-vote for an All-Star Game not two years after we screamed bloody murder over Damnocrats multivoting for a certain extinguished Vice President in Florida and maybe elsewhere, we end up looking like the idiots. And I don't think FREEPers are idiots.

Baseball has enough problems without this kind of nonsense. I say again: Those who conceived this ballot box stuffing (sorry, but that is what it is, no matter the 25-vote allowance) idea as a contraction protest may have their hearts in the right places, but their brains have gone to bed.
5 posted on 06/04/2002 7:49:30 PM PDT by BluesDuke
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