How To Fix All-Star Selections

There are major flaws with All-Star selections in any major sport and how the games itself are played. I'm here to help you baby birds and I'm going to fix the system.

Most major sports select their All-Stars midway through the season. This becomes a huge problem because who really deserves to be an All-Star, the best of the best, should be determined by the sample size of an entire season. By not deciding All-Stars at the end of a season, we, as sports fans and sports leagues, are only giving honors and rewarding players for only playing part of a season. Yet players still play after an All-Star selection, players still put up stats after a selection, and players still (for the most part) put in effort to continue to win games. Everything that athletes do after an All-Star selection essentially becomes meaningless and void. Think about this, Jermaine Dye was an All-Star snub last season and Brad Hawpe was an All-Star. When you look at these players numbers at the time of All-Star voting, these players rightfully deserved to go. But each of these players had awful second halves. Worse than getting Paris Hilton's sloppy 5,212th bad. After a season, we judge how a player is doing after his entire body of work. If a player has been inconsistent (i.e. a guy like Pat Burrell), he gets criticized for it. But that's not how it's done with All-Star voting. Because we don't know how a players' entire season gets played out, we are rewarding players for being good for a period of time. But if that same players becomes inconsistent, he receives less of a punishment because he already has his All-Star selection.

This is also an argument about fairness. A guy with a great first half and shitty second half doesn't get the same treatment as a guy with an awful first half but a phenomenal second half. Even if you don't want to classify something as "fair" or not, there's just something inside of you that you know is wrong to select All-Stars before the season is over. Think about it. When you vote for MVPs, you vote for them at the end of the year. In other sports like football, Pro Bowl alternates are chosen based upon their entire season of work (because the season is over when these players are chosen). When you look back upon an athletes year they had, you look at their entire year- not just part of it.

So now that we've decided that All-Stars should be chosen after a season is over, we must now determine who gets to choose who becomes an All-Star. Number one plan implemented is that ordinary fans are not allowed to vote on players. Ordinary fans are dumb and do not know how to truly measure how good a player is. This year the aging and crappy A.I. was voted an All-Star based upon what he has done throughout his career. Alfonsio Soriano and Manny Rameriz got an unnecessary and high amount of votes for last years MLB All-Star. Now I'm not suggesting that everyone has to be as "smart" or in depth as a guy like DME is with baseball to be allowed to vote, but if fans are to have the power to vote, then there needs to be a screening process first.

I'm all for having players and managers/coaches have a huge input. Sure, occasionally you get what happened in 2008 where the players voted the awful Jason Varitek as the 3rd AL catcher over A.J. Pierzynski because everyone hates AJ and Varitek is well respected. But as whole, these people see and evaluate others in the league and truly know the worth of each players. I'm also not against having columnists and well known and respected analysts vote on All-Stars like they tend to do for MVP and Hall of Fame voting, but again a screening process needs to be utilized. We don't need any Steve Phillips voting on All-Stars based upon what he "sees with his eyes" (in fact, any analysts who solely basis his decision upon a players worth but his eyesight alone is not only not allowed to vote on All-Stars but is also banished from the sport). This system establishes that the "true" All-Stars get chosen.

Now let me pause her for a second and tell you why chosing All-Stars this way is important. The biggest argument I've heard is that "All-Star games are the fans game. This is a game just for the fans and the fans should be able to choose what they want to see." This reasoning is flawed in two respects. The first, is that the fans absolutely don't give a shit about the games itself. The NFL moved the Pro Bowl from a week after the Superbowl to the week before because nobody watched nor cared about it. Sure people watch the MLB All-Star game, but that's just because "it means something" and most fans will tell you that choosing home field advantage via the All Star game is a dumb idea. Fans do not care inherently about the games themselves; they just don't.

Secondly, and more importantly, All-Star selections help determine Hall of Fame voting. Of course All Star selections are not the end all be all, they still are a major factor that HOF voters look at when determining who belongs as the best of the best. A sport like baseball is starting to, and can, trend away from that because statistics are a FANTASTIC way to judge individual talent. But stats are harder for a sport like football. Stats are not necessarily the best way to judge say about how is the best offensive tackles of all time, or safeties. In this instance, All-Star selections are a great way, like The Hidden Game of Football suggests, to determine HOFers. This is also another reason to why AS selections should be after an entire season and not in the middle.

Lastly, the games themselves. As mentioned earlier, nobody gives a crap about them. Sure SOME people would throw a stink of there never was an All-Star game again, but I think a side poll GOI had (of course not in the least scientific nor am I claiming it is) showing people didn't care about the Pro Bowl, is indicative of fans view All Star games in general. The game itself is worthless to people, it's the athletes that have been selected that people care about.

So the final solution? First, have AS selections done after a season has ended. Next, have a screening process so only those who really know how to evaluate athletes are allowed to have an input in AS selections. Lastly, just have a list (analogous to what college basketball does with it's First All American teams or Silver Sluggers) of who is an All Star; there is no need to play a meaningless game.

Boom. Done. I've fixed everything. Sure, some people (like say league commissioners who will lose a shit ton of money and revenue that All Star games bring to their sports), but screw those guys. This is for the greater good.