This may sound like the cranky whining of an oldtimer who thinks things were better in his day, and you’re right. When it came to All-Star voting, at least, it just wasn’t any better than when we punched ballots with pencils, inkpens, or toothpicks.
Children of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, turn your head. Go back to your iPods, BlackBerries, and live streaming video on the Internets. Surf the web, find your All-Star “ballot,” and click to your heart’s content. Whatever you do, just go away. This column is for the simpler baseball fan – the one who would blush at filling out more than one punch card, let alone click on hundreds.
I should have kept at least one for posterity. Gillette lent its name to the pale blue and white ballots in my day (the 1970s), and it was fitting – because the sides were razor sharp. They were about the size of a business-sized envelope, maybe 2 1/2” x 5”. One-sided, of course, which meant all the candidates were listed in almost agate-sized type – National Leaguers on the left, American Leaguers on the right, vertically.
And oh, those chads! There were about 8-10 names listed per position, and beside those names were the hallmark of the Gillette ballots. Tiny rectangular boxes that were so small they defied poking by finger. Hence the aforementioned writing instruments or toothpicks.
You voted for one player for catcher and the infield slots, then three for the outfield. That was it – unless you had a write-in candidate, and you were only allowed one of those per league, if memory serves. The bottom quarter of the ballot had spaces for the write-ins. It was a very tidy system. If your write-in was a second baseman, then you’d better leave that position blank, and punch the write-in chad. Failure to do this correctly would void your ballot. Don’t scoff at the notion of write-ins. Steve Garvey started the All-Star game of 1974 for the National League as a write-in at first base.
And we weren’t entrusted with voting for pitchers. Absolutely not. That was left to the manager.
The Gillette ballots were available at the ballpark, and select retail outlets. But perhaps the best part was what you did with them after you poked them. I did my voting at the stadium, and there it would be – the folded-together cardboard display with the simple slot sliced into it, the MLB and Gillette logos prominent on it. Into the box your ballot would go. If you couldn’t make it to the park, you could mail it in (with a stamp and everything), if you can imagine such a thing.
See the "Gillette" name on top?Notice how I’m not using “ballot” in the plural. It was more honorable back then. Oh, you could take as many ballots as you wanted, but I only voted once per season, and somehow I think I wasn’t in the minority.
It all seems so archaic now. Imagine a bunch of crotchety stadium workers, whose job it was to empty the cardboard displays and gather the cards, then ship them off to who knows where, ostensibly to be sorted and put thru some sort of machine to be read. It was, essentially, a blend of the modus operandi of the U.S. postal service, the SAT people, and IBM.
It was a satisfying feeling, dropping my punched card into the slot at Tiger Stadium. It was the adolescent version of civic duty, it was. You voted, and somewhere somebody – or something – was counting it.
Space was limited, so who was actually on the ballot became an annual ritual of suspense. It wasn’t a given that every player from every team would appear as a candidate. By the end of spring training the names would leak out.
Maybe in 1973 the Tigers on the ballot were Norm Cash, Aurelio Rodriguez, Willie Horton, and Mickey Stanley. Certainly Bill Freehan, too. Or maybe not. Every year it changed.
Now a word about ballot box stuffing. First of all, it was a literal term. These really were multiple ballots being stuffed into the Gillette display slot. By today’s standard, “stuffing” consists of exponential clicks of a mouse on the appropriate website. In the Gillette days, one could stuff the box if one had the patience to poke chads for hours on end. And then sweep all the eensy-weensy rectangles off your floor.
The voting results were printed in the newspaper, as they are today, but if your guy was falling behind, you didn’t have the convenience of zipping off an e-mail to all your comrades, urging frantic clicking. Back to the ballpark you went, to grab a handful (if that was your thing; it wasn’t mine) of Gillette cards and start de-chadding them. And all you could do was hope that other Tigers fans were doing the same.
One thing the voting of yesteryear had in common with the nonsense that occurs nowadays is its occasional unfair results. The system may have been blissfully simple back then, but it was still a popularity contest – which meant that undeserving players, previous stars who were off to miserable starts, would nonetheless find themselves leading their positions. Nobody said it was perfect – but it WAS better.
You can still vote at the ballpark today, but the influx of online voting makes the ballpark voting practically irrelevant. It’s perhaps a gentle nod to greybeards like me, to provide an outlet for voting at the stadium. But we’re a disenfranchised lot, I’m telling you.
Sure, All-Star voting today is more convenient. How can it not be, when you can participate in baseball civics in your PJs and slippers? After all, who wants to drive down to the ballpark, grab a paper ballot and punch out tiny rectangles and place them into a cardboard box and vote only once?
I’m not the person of whom to ask that question. Because I’m wondering why anyone wouldn’t want to do that.
The computer was a great invention, but it wasn’t meant for everything.
I’m loathe to let go of the past. I still shave with a Gillette razor, to show you.
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