Wednesday, June 27, 2007

DevilRays.com Knows Not Of This Baseball That We Speak Of
We are beginning to wonder who the hell writes the headlines for the stories at DevilRays.com. We hope for Dawn Klemish's sake, it is not the same person that writes the articles. After this latest diaper filled with Indian poop, we are not even sure it is somebody that knows anything about baseball.

Yesterday Dawn Klemish of DevilRays.com wrote a story about the All-Star game voting that ran with the title "Speedsters in All-star Game hunt". And just to make sure we didn't confuse Carl Crawford and BJ Upton with other "speedsters" like Jose Reyes and Benji Molina they added the sub-headline "Crawford, Upton need help though to go to San Francisco".

We haven't been paying attention to the vote totals, but we can tell you that the only way Crawford and Upton are getting to San Francisco is to buy their own coach ticket and scalp tickets outside of PacBell Park like the rest of us. We don't need to look at the vote totals because the voting is a popularity test and Devil Rays players are about as popular as a rectal exam. And even if all 632 Devil Rays fans voted their allotted 25 times, Crawford and Upton still wouldn't even be able to see first place.

Having not yet read the article, nor have we looked at any of the voting, let us now calculate exactly how much "help" Crawford and Upton need with THREE DAYS LEFT TO VOTE...

AL Second Basemen
Team
Total Votes
P. Palanco
DET
1,269,717


R. Cano
NYY
965,712
D. Pedroia
BOS
585,544
L. Castillo
MIN
529,031
BJ Upton
TB
490,389


AL Outfielders
Team
Total Votes
V. GuerreroANA
2,043,824


M. Ordonez
DET
1,445,899
I. Suzuki
SEA
1,409,762
M. Ramirez
BOS
1,386,522
T. Hunter
MIN
1,085,445
G. Sheffield
DET
957,823


G. Sizemore
CLE
802,752


B. Abreu
NYY
746,290


J. Damon
NYY
708,877


H. Matsui
NYY
666,546


JD Drew
BOS
640,889


C. Crisp
BOS
559,339


S. Sosa
TEX
515,440


C. Crawford
TB
434,507



All-star voting began on April 23. In the first 62 days of voting, Upton and Crawford managed to pick up less than 500,000 votes each. In order to be voted onto the AL All-star team, Upton will need to find another 800,000 votes in the next 3 days while Crawford will need more than 1.5 million. Of course, then they will only win the voting if nobody else receives any votes in the next three days.

But hey, Crawford and Upton are "in the hunt".

In defense of Klemish, she really does not imply at any point in the article that Crawford and Upton have any shot at being voted to the All-Star team, although she did add this tidbit...
Upton is back in fifth place in a close battle for the second-base spot on the All-Star roster that's led by Detroit's Placido Polanco.
The only truth to that statement is that Upton is in 5th place, and Polanco leads the voting. There is no "close battle" and Upton certainly is not part of it.

Could Upton and Crawford still be named to the All-Star team as reserves? Certainly, but not likely. The managers of each squad have much more flexibility when it comes to the pitching staff then they do with the position players. James Shields has probably pitched his way out of consideration, which leaves Al Reyes as the logical choice to be the Devil Rays lone All-Star representative.

Speedster in All-star Game hunt [DevilRays.com]

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Come on now ... there aren't 632 Devil Rays fans. 32 maybe.

7:51 AM  
Blogger Jordi said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

9:49 AM  
Blogger Jordi said...

One of my complaints with the Devil Rays was that as of early June at the games you couldn't even tell there was an all-star game to be played. No announcements of "vote for your favorite Devil Ray" or anything. They just handed me a ballot. Great. Thanks. If the organization wants me to be excited for their players, all I ask is that they share the excitement. A little player marketing would go a long way.

By the way, you don't think Pena has an outside shot?

9:50 AM  
Blogger The Professor said...

Pena is more than deserving, but he will most likely get lost in the numbers. generally there are 14-15 reserves named to the team. and the manager needs to obviously consider positions and teams when filling out. most likely there are 2 reserve first basemen.

Big Papi is going to be the starter. and they will need spots for Youkilis (.330 BA) and Mourneau (20HR)

making it worse is that the game is in SF..so no DH. which means any DHs will probably go on roster as first basemen (ie. Big Papi).

Pena has a shot bc 1B is not as deep as other years, but it will still be tough.

10:55 AM  

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