“You love me! You really love me!”
Freddie Freeman of the Atlanta Braves and Steve Delabar of the Toronto Blue Jays were chosen by fans as the winners of the 2013 All-Star Game Final Vote.
I gotta say, I’m rather shocked at the NL result. I woulda thought that Yasiel PuigMania would have carried the day. And that if it didn’t, someone at Major League Baseball would turn this into some Soviet-era election in which the glorious voice of the proletariat cried out for Puig to win despite the longest of odds or something. Guess not.
Not that we should take too much from this. The voting procedures for this were even more gonzo than the regular All-Star voting, with Twitter hashtags counting as votes in the final hours before the polls closed. That, combined with open campaigning made this something less than a scientific referendum.
But it may be a broad referendum on what people want the All-Star Game to be. I feel like a Puig vote is a vote for the All-Star Game as spectacle and excitement and what people may want to see, regardless of some measure of merit. I feel like a Freeman vote is one in which people look at overall value (and Freeman, having played all year has added more aggregate value to the Braves than Puig has to the Dodgers) and decided to reward a greater body of work over a big splash. Maybe this voting is even too silly to determine that. I don’t know.
But I do know that, barring Puig as an injury replacement in the days leading up to the All-Star game, he’s going to be sitting at home and watching on TV. And Jonathan Papelbon will be happy.
As for Delabar: relief pitcher beats out other relief pitchers and it’s hard for me to work up much emotion of any kind about that. But at least this relief pitcher has a great story, so that’s nice.
