All-Star conspiracy?

The National League has not won any of the last ten Major League Baseball All-Star Games. It has lost nine times, and one abomination ended in a tie. The most recent loss came last night when Trevor Hoffman blew a 2-1 lead and a save after allowing a single and two extra-base hits.

A digression: the commentators touted Hoffman's great career record in save situations when he came in. He proceeded to blow the save. They proceeded to tout Mariano Rivera's similarly impressive career numbers when he appeared as a result. Don't they learn? Maybe save situations are different when they come against stacked line-ups.

Now back to the real point. The All-Star Game was recently (in baseball history terms) made meaningful when the commissioner's office decided that the winning league would have home field advantage in the World Series. Remember the "This time it counts" campaign? The American League has once again secured that privilege after Michael Young's two-out triple last night.

The thing that got me thinking is that the fans get to choose the starting line-ups (modulo injury, etc.) of the two sides. What if American League fans vastly outnumbered National League fans? Or what if they voted more often? Couldn't they vote for sub-optimal players on the NL side to increase the chances that the AL would win the World Series advantage?

I'm not suggesting that anything like this has ever happened. I'm just suggesting that maybe this policy isn't very good. One way to fix it would be to drop the home-field consequence. Another would be to take All-Star voting out of the hands of the fans. That's my vote, since they often collectively make such stupid decisions.

One counter-argument is that fans vote for who they want to see, even if those players aren't necessarily having the best seasons. But I don't think that's true. I think a lot of voters just don't pay that much attention to what they're doing. They vote for who they've heard of, or who they think is good based on past seasons.

So long as the outcome of the game affects the World Series, the leagues should decide their own players. They would control their own destinies. If things are going right, then this should result in pretty much the same outcome as fan voting. But it would steal a little ammo from the conspiracy theorists.