Paper All-Star Ballots Were Pointless Anyway: Why Baseball Needs to Stop Looking Backward

Sometimes, most times really, baseball makes it incredibly difficult for us to enjoy baseball. Baseball sells itself as a game of tradition: National Pastime, Ken Burns, the Hall of Fame, asterisks, "grit." For decades, the sport has looked backwards. And what we see in the rear view mirror has informed every aspect of how we watch, consume, and discuss the sport with our friends. There's obviously been a shift of late, with the advent of sabermetrics and increased role of technology, but a baseball season still consists of 162 servings of saccharine nostalgia.

How else to explain this, a lament for the paper ballot for All-Star voting? Not the idea of the All-Star ballot. The actual paper ballot available at games. I've been to my fair share of games. I've covered all the other bases, if you will, hot dogs, beers, cracker jacks. I've even kept score with those stupid golf pencils. And I've never once even seen a paper All-Star ballot, let alone filled one out (ed. note: We do not know how this is possible, but Sean insists and so we take his word.) Maybe it's just a case of different strokes for different folks, but I promise you, if any other sport did this (maybe they have already and it wasn't even a news item because who gives a shit, right?), nobody would be writing odes to the paper ballot of our youth. Can't believe I won't ever sit with my old man and participate in the voting process for the Pro Bowl, said no one. No one would ever say that because it is preposterous.

Do you remember the glory days, when you would run to the mailbox and pick up your credit card statement? Just not the same anymore with email.

This is baseball. Baseball revels in insufferable anachronism for no good reason other than it always has. Young players are vilified because they smile, or celebrate, or fucking eat lunch during a spring training game. Yasiel Puig is a bona fide joy to watch play baseball and the amount of chatter about his "attitude" makes you want to beat your head against the desk. Baseball is a place where athletes with muscles sculpted in the plains of Oklahoma hit dingers. Baseball is definitely not a place where those same players get sucked off under the bleachers in Yankee Stadium. Not our game. It's a strike against other sports that they don't behave this way. And people eat it up!

Nostalgia is nice and all, but baseball is still here. It's not gone. There's no reason to mourn the loss of innocence or youth because Alex Rodriguez did steroids or you can't scribble in a name for the All-Star game. Although baseball has made a business of equating itself with its golden past, its actually the present that still draws us to baseball games. Are you really going to be bummed out at a baseball park with your friends, or dad, or brother or sister because you couldn't fill in a ballot at the same time? Watch the game, have the discussions, drink the beers; it will be the same, I promise you.

In a recent column for the Boston Globe, Nick Cafardo wrote "In our day, we loved baseball cards and all we cared about was batting average, home runs, and RBIs. It was simple." This was part of a larger argument that kids today aren't very interested in baseball and an even larger appreciation for the charm of olden times. Here's another theory: baseball is fucking exhausting. Rules and unwritten rules. Nonstop talk on the radio and television about how baseball just isn't the same anymore. The league scorning its own players. I'm an adult and it drives me insane. If I were a kid, I'd say fuck it and go play basketball.

Baseball, the game, is fine. Baseball, the institution is a mess. Nothing is ever as good as we remember it, so if we keep trying to compare baseball to a phony memory we are doing the game a disservice. But you can rest assured, in 30 years someone will write the same Cafardo column, only then it will be about OPS+, WHiP, and WAR. The only difference is that they are different and that is a de facto bad thing.

Things change and that is more than OK, that is the way it works. Maybe you have very vivid and fun recollections of filling out an All-Star ballot by hand, on paper. Which is fine—great even—but you can still vote, it will just be different. The whole reason they are even getting rid of the paper ballots in the first place is because barely anybody uses them anymore. It is the natural evolution of life. And only in baseball can progress be met with disappointment. Only in baseball are the mementos more important than where they came from.