How to make sure your favorite player makes the All-Star game.

Here's what the City of Cincinnati wanted the the all-star ballot to look like in 1957:

Johnny Temple, 2B
Roy McMillan, SS
Don Hoak, 3B
Ed Bailey, C
Frank Robinson, LF
Gus Bell, CF
Wally Post, RF
Stan Musial, 1B

Interesting? Only that everybody listed there outside of Stan "The Man" played for the Cincinnati Reds at the time. Good power move by the fans, yet the commish stepped in and raised a heavy hand. The Commissioner, Ford Frick, decided there were two other player in the league that might also deserve a chance to participate in baseball's mid-summer classic so he added Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. Subsequently, Bell and Post lost their spots.

Now. Outside of that being good fodder, it's a nice set up for the here and now. There are several things that can be learned from this. They are:
1) Ballot box stuffing has been around for a long time;
2) Fans are loyal and rabid;
3) The players don't have to be the best at that point in the season to be elected to the all-star game.

And, now we have the internet. Don't worry about getting caught and realize you are not the only one doing this. You just have to have the will and a little time on your hands.

It also helps if you are from a big market like New York or Boston. Two years ago, the American league only had one starter that was not a member of either of these juggernauts.

And it helps if you are really good at working with computers. If you can use internet technology to fool the MLB's information system to let you vote multiple times, all the better. Somebody pulled that trick off in 1999 for Nomar. Yup, gave Nomar Garciaparra 14,000 automated votes. Don't worry though. You can match that with a little resourcefulness. Just start a chain email that "cannot be broke" or everybody will get "seven years of bad luck" or it will snow seven feet in seven hours like they claim it does in Oswego, New York. Just make it really serious and remind them that your guy would NEVER do that kind of stuff and attach a link to some nice non-profit website that he donates money to.

The point is, with the internet, the fix is in already. Big market teams have more fans than your team probably does. (I am one of the few believers that actually believe you small market teams even know how to use the internet.)

With it being a good possibility that over 20 million people will log on worldwide this year to vote on the all-star balloting, it is going to take some unfair play to ensure your guy gets in.

O.k., so, if you've read this far it's fair to assume I can up the ante and we can add on some severity here. Major League baseball teams use their ad dollars, their stadiums and their mascots to push their best players up in the balloting but it's going to take YOU the fan to break that horizon line. Here it is: you gotta take your plight to YouTube. Get on there and do whatever it takes to get your guy in the all-star game and, do me a favor, drop me a link in the comment box beneath this so I can see how good it is. You got from now until May 2008. Get on it little Paduan.
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(Thanks for my fact-collecting resources. They're great for any and all about the great game of baseball: www.mlb.com, www.about.com, and www.wikipedia.com)