Another Way To Look at the All-Star Voting
PLUS: 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF BASEBALL'S FIRST 40-HOMER TRIO
IBWAA members love to write about baseball. So much so, we've decided to create our own newsletter about it! Subscribe to Here's the Pitch to expand your love of baseball, discover new voices, and support independent writing. Original content six days a week, straight to your inbox and straight from the hearts of baseball fans.
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Tom Seaver made 10 straight Opening Day starts for the Mets . . .
When the pandemic-shortened 2020 season started, the Toronto Blue Jays were permitted to sell only 15 per cent of potential tickets, limiting capacity at Dunedin’s TD Ballpark to 1,275 . . .
Miguel Cabrera, the last man to win a Triple Crown, is showing signs of age: he had yet to hit a 2023 home run as the calendar reached Memorial Day . . .
Adam Wainwright, the fast-fading ace of the St. Louis Cardinals, says he’ll find a way to raise his lifetime batting average from .199 to .200 — even though NL pitchers don’t bat anymore . . .
First baseman Joey Votto has played his entire 17-season career in Cincinnati but if he’s to stick with the Reds, it’d almost certainly be at a cheaper price than the $20 million team option, balanced by a $7 million buyout. Votto, 39, had an anemic .205/.319/.370 batting line last year and hasn’t played in 2023 after rotator cuff surgery he underwent last August . . .
Teams that topped 80,000 in attendance: the Yankees had 85,265 at Yankee Stadium for a twinbill against the Philadelphia Athletics on Sept. 9, 1928, then 83,533 for a double-dip against the Boston Red Sox on May 30, 1938; the Cleveland Indians drew 85,563 to Municipal Stadium for a pair against the Yankees on Sept. 12, 1954; and the Colorado Rockies attracted 80,227 to Denver’s old Mile High Stadium on April 9, 1993 for an Opening Day game — the first the team ever played — against the Montreal Expos. That doesn’t even count the 115,300 who flocked to the Los Angeles Coliseum on March 29, 2008 for an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the visiting Red Sox on “Roy Campanella Night.”
Leading Off
Rethinking All-Star Voting
By Daniel R. Epstein
MLB All-Star voting has already begun and the IBWAA’s own All-Star voting commences this coming week.
By definition, IBWAA members love baseball enough to write about the sport or create multimedia content covering it, so we should have an insightful perspective on who are the best players through the first half of the season.
Of course, our members could already vote for All-Stars by filling out an official MLB All-Star ballot, but so can everyone else in the world. There are millions of ballots cast each year, with many people voting dozens of times.
As of today, there are 806 IBWAA members, so in a members-only election, each ballot is more meaningful. Besides, voting is fun! More opportunities to vote are always welcome, which is why we also do end-of-season awards, Hall of Fame, and preseason prediction balloting.
Fans first voted for All-Stars in 1946, lost the right to vote in 1957, then got it back in 1970. There haven’t been many changes to the election process in all those years. We still can’t even vote for pitchers!
When the IBWAA started its own All-Star voting in 2021, we re-imagined what it should look like. We tried to mirror MLB’s voting where possible, but we wanted to modernize the ballot and give our members an opportunity to put their baseball knowledge to good use.
Here are the rules for the IBWAA All-Star election, some of which will look familiar while others are different:
Voters choose the pitchers. The IBWAA ballot includes a section for pitchers from each league. Each voter chooses 12 pitchers per league: six starters, two relievers, and four at-large regardless of their role—starters, closers, long relievers, openers, etc.
Voters pick at-large position players. In addition to the usual position player spots (one catcher, one from each infield position, three outfielders, and a designated hitter), voters pick three at-large position players in each league. If the two best players in the league both happen to play third base, the at-large spots allow voters to pick them both, but it creates other difficult decisions too!
Every member can vote… but only members can vote. Participating in IBWAA elections is a privilege of membership, so it’s members-only. However, everyone is welcome to join the IBWAA, All IBWAA members are eligible to vote, regardless of whether they’ve been a member for years or if they just joined yesterday.
Only one vote per person. Stuffing ballots is an MLB All-Star voting tradition, but for practical reasons, IBWAA members are limited to one vote each. Rather than an electorate of millions of people, we merely have hundreds. If a few members skewed the election by voting repeatedly, it would be evident in the results.
After the voting is finished, we use the results to compile the IBWAA All-Star teams based upon who received the most votes. Positional and at-large votes for the same player are added together, so for example, if a player earned 200 votes as a starting pitcher and 100 as an at-large pitcher, we consider them as having 300 total votes.
Here’s the structure for the teams once we add everything up:
20 position players including at least three catchers, two players at each infield position, five outfielders, and one designated hitter. The “starters” are the players with the most votes at each position.
12 pitchers with a minimum of six starters and two relievers.
If a player gets elected as both a pitcher and a position player (who could that be?), we choose one more player to complete a full 32-player roster.
Naturally, the IBWAA All-Stars don’t necessarily get to go to the real All-Star Game, but this actually liberates us in a few different ways. We don’t need MLB’s rule mandating at least one player representing each of the 30 teams. We also don’t have to negotiate with managers about which pitchers are available or how many innings they can throw. If an All-Star pulls a hamstring the weekend before the All-Star Game, we don’t have to scramble for a replacement. We simply pick the best, most deserving baseball players.
If you’re an IBWAA member, keep an eye out for your All-Star ballot in your inbox. Whether you participate in the MLB voting, the IBWAA voting, or both, have fun picking your players!
Daniel R. Epstein serves as Co-Director of the IBWAA. He writes for Baseball Prospectus and Off the Bench Baseball.
Cleaning Up
Trio of Braves’ Bombers Belted 40 Homers In Same Season 50 Years Ago
By Dan Schlossberg
Going once, going twice, going three times.
Hitting 40 home runs in a season is difficult. Hitting 40 home runs in the same season a teammate does it is next to impossible.
No wonder 50 years have passed since three teammates did it at the same time for the first time in baseball history.
It happened in 1973, when Hank Aaron hit 40 at age 39 as he chased Babe Ruth’s career record. Darrell Evans, at 26, hit one more, finishing at 41. And first-year Brave Davey Johnson, who later managed five major-league teams, finished at 43, one behind National League leader Willie Stargell.
Twenty-three years passed before the improbable happened again.
A trio of players who prospered in the alpine air of the Mile High City reached 40 for the Colorado Rockies. Andres Galarraga, later a 40-homer man for Atlanta, led the way with 47, followed by Vinny Castilla and Ellis Burks with exactly 40 apiece.
One year later, the Denver-based ballclub had another trio at the 40-40-40 level. Larry Walker, en route to the National League MVP award and a future berth in the Baseball Hall of Fame, led the team and the league with 49. Galarraga had 41 and Castilla 40.
There have been other terrific trios, notable Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda in San Francisco and Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Yogi Berra in the Bronx. But neither trio of teammates ever reached 40 in the same season, even though all but Maris eventually found their way to Cooperstown.
Speaking of Maris, he and Dale Murphy are the only men not named Barry Bonds to win consecutive MVP awards without reaching the Hall of Fame.
Maris also owns the two-man, single-season home run record of 115, reached in 1961 when he hit 61 and Mantle hit 54. That erased the mark of 107 set by Ruth (60) and Lou Gehrig (47) in 1927. The only other duo to combine for triple digits were Alex Rodriguez (57) and Rafael Palmeiro (43) of the Texas Rangers.
Rodriguez also combined with Ken Griffey, Jr. to hit 98 in 1998, when both were with the Seattle Mariners.
Throughout baseball history, there were 29 seasons in which teammates scaled the 40-homer plateau simultaneously. Aaron and Eddie Mathews, who hold the career record of 863 home runs during the time they were together with the Braves, did it several times. But Maris and Mantle, after staging a two-man chase of Ruth’s single-season record, did it only once, as Maris never hit more than 39 in any other season.
The way the ball flies today — especially on a humid summer day in Fenway Park, when the wind is blowing out at Wrigley Field, or just about any time in Denver, Cincinnati, or Philadelphia — home run records should be falling by the dozen.
But it’s just not happening.
And it won’t happen this season either.
Even when the Minnesota Twins hit a record 307 home runs in 2019 and the Yankees hit just one less, no threesome of players on either team topped 40.
For the record, there have been teams with four 30-homer men in the same season. When Dusty Baker hits his 30th homer of the season against the Astros' J.R. Richard on Oct. 2, 1977, the Los Angeles Dodgers become the first team with four 30-homer men, along with Steve Garvey (33), Reggie Smith (32), and Ron Cey (30).
Those 2019 Twins did one better, with five 30-homer hitters: Nelson Cruz, Mitch Garver, Max Kepler, Eddie Rosario, and Miguel Sano.
But three at 40? Even that juggernaut from Minnesota couldn’t do that.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is weekend editor of Here’s The Pitch, national baseball writer for forbes.com, and author of 40 baseball books (with two more in the works). E.mail him at ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Although attendance for Brooklyn Dodgers exhibition games in 1947 Havana wasn’t that good, a throng of 15,000 arrived for an exhibition game involving the Racine Belles of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League . . .
During Brooklyn’s sojourn in Havana, the team made trips to Caracas and Panama . . .
The Dodgers again played exhibition games in Cuba during 1959 spring training, when rains washed out a scheduled set with the Cincinnati Reds . . .
Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews homered in the same game a record 75 times . . .
When Aaron hit his last home run on July 20, 1976, the opposing right-fielder was Bobby Bonds, father of the man who would later break Aaron’s record of 755 . . .
During the 2001 campaign, Barry Bonds hit his 53rd home run on the 53rd anniversary of the death of Babe Ruth, who died at age 53. It was also the 53rd multi-homer game of Bonds’ career. The final score, not surprisingly, was 5-3.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.