For as long as baseball’s All-Star Game has been played—almost every year since 1933, including twice a year from 1959 to 1962—it’s been the ultimate in wish fulfillment for fans. Want to see a team of future Hall of Famers playing together? It’s got that. Want to see your favorite local players honored on a national stage? It’s possible. Poignant curtain calls and unexpected comedy? You bet.
But actual fan participation in selecting All-Star teams? That’s been a rockier road.
In this generation, when baseball fans are inundated with emails and in-stadium announcements encouraging All-Star Game voting, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t always the case. But after the first game in 1933 featured fan voting, team selections were done briefly by player vote and then entirely by managers.
Then, at the winter meetings in 1946, owners voted to allow fan voting for eight of the nine starting positions. (Then as today, managers would pick the pitchers, as well as the reserves.)
The arrangement worked well, for a while—until Cincinnati Reds fans got involved.
The first signs of trouble came in 1956. The Reds had made back-to-back World Series in 1939 and 1940, being swept by the Yankees then beating the Tigers. Their next World Series appearance wouldn’t come until 1961, another loss to the Yankees. The interceding two decades were relatively lackluster for the team, which from 1953 to 1959 officially changed its name to the Redlegs to avoid even a tenuous connection to communism during the days of HUAC and the Red Scare.
But in 1956, Cincinnati finally fielded a team that could compete. They had an offense that hammered the ball, hitting 77 home runs over the season’s first 45 games, a record pace. (They would hit 221 home runs as a team that year, tying the record at the time.) The lineup included slugging first baseman Ted Kluszewski, who made it a habit of playing with no undershirt under his sleeveless Reds jersey, both for range of motion and, admittedly, the gamesmanship of showing off his bulging biceps. The outfield of Gus Bell and Wally Post was joined by a rookie named Frank Robinson, and through the first half of the season, the Reds were in the thick of a pennant race.
Fans, giddy at the first contending team in a long time, responded, electing five Cincinnati players to start the All-Star Game: second baseman Johnny Temple, shortstop Roy McMillan, Robinson in left field, Bell in center, and Ed Bailey catching.
No Reds had been leading in the balloting when voting closed, but the league office, which tabulated the votes, was confused and overwhelmed by a late surge in ballots, to the point where ending fan voting altogether was considered. The drastic step was endorsed by The Sporting News, regarded then as “the Bible of Baseball. “It is conceivable that the fan poll is on the way out,” Dan Daniel wrote. “Its elimination would be regretted. But it would not necessarily be a serious blow to the event.”
There were cries of unfairness in certain quarters (namely Brooklyn, home to the defending champion Dodgers), but Commissioner Ford Frick saw nothing untoward.
“Everybody had a chance to vote, no matter where they lived, so there should be no squawk if somebody doesn’t like the team,” Frick told the Enquirer. “I think it is a representative team. There is nobody there who doesn’t belong.”
It’d take only a year for him to change his tune.
In 1957, hopes were high for the Redlegs. The previous year, they’d been in first place as late as July, but hadn’t been able to overcome the onslaught of the Dodgers and Braves. Even in third place, Cincinnati had won 91 games. Could 1957 be the year?
As the Midsummer Classic approached, Cincinnati media and businesses strongly encouraged voting early and often—and inadvertently, so did baseball itself. There were ballots available at the ballpark and through local newspapers, which would collect them to send to New York for tabulation. But in the fine print, MLB said it would accept official ballots or “a reasonable facsimile.” In Cincinnati, they took that and ran with it.
There were ballots printed in the papers, most notably the Cincinnati Times-Star, which was the city’s official ballot collection point. Those ballots were blank, but ran next to a listing of Reds players to vote for. The Burger Brewing Company, which sponsored Reds broadcasts, printed up 350,000 of their own unofficial but valid “ballots” and distributed them to regional bars. At some establishments, patrons had to fill out a ballot before they would be served. There were also reports of mimeographed completed ballots being returned en masse to collection points in Cincinnati and Columbus. Some fans told reporters they’d each voted hundreds of times.
There might have been an element of defiance to Redlegs fans’ voting. That May, National League owners met six weeks earlier than usual (in preparation for Congressional hearings on the sport’s antitrust exemption), and stories suggested that one of the big topics discussed was relocation, with Giants owner Horace Stoneham and Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley both denying reports that they would be relocating to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. Reports also indicated that if those moves did happen, the Redlegs would then relocate to New York. “I would not even dignify such rumors by commenting on them,” said Redlegs President Gabe Paul.
Of course, the Dodgers and Giants both decamped for California after the season. The Redlegs stayed in Cincinnati (with talk of a new ballpark to replace Crosley Field). But that summer, Cincinnati fans would have been forgiven for feeling like they had to prove a point.
A June 19 report from International News Service said that three Redlegs were leading on the ballot: McMillan, Robinson and Bailey. But once again, a late avalanche from the Queen City—estimated at 550,000 votes, more than half of all NL ballots cast—altered the outcome at the last minute.
Once the ballots were tabulated, it appeared that every starting position player on the National League team would be from Cincinnati.
On June 28, three days before the starting lineups were to be officially announced, Frick stepped in and made an unprecedented move. After consulting with the league presidents, he announced that Stan Musial would replace George Crowe as starting first baseman, and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron would replace Gus Bell and Wally Post in the outfield. (Musial would get a late surge and turn out to be the highest vote-getter at first base.)
The replacements were certainly deserving enough—Musial, Mays, and Aaron would all finish in the top four in NL MVP voting that year—but Frick’s decision had Redlegs fans seeing, well, red. They found the move capricious, even dictatorial. “This isn’t Russia,” fan William Hughes told The New York Times.
An effigy of Frick—constructed at a local bar that had turned in 12,000 all-star ballots—was put in the bed of a truck and driven around Cincinnati. Times-Star Sports Editor Bob Firestone suggested Frick be removed from office.
“If a candidate for public office was elected because the supporters of his rival did not get out to vote, I am sure his election would still stand,” said Paul, the team president.
Frick conceded the point that the Redlegs and their fans had done nothing wrong, saying, “The overbalance of Cincinnati ballots has resulted in the selection of a team which would not be typical of the league.
“I don’t question the honesty of the poll, but something had to be done.”
In the interest of balance, the Times-Star did run some letters suggesting that Frick was merely correcting the mockery of the game made by Cincinnati fans. “By their unsportsmanlike partisanship, Cincinnati fans have demonstrated that they are not major-league enough to be trusted with the responsibility of voting for the all-star team,” declared one letter-writer. “If Cincinnati had eight players good enough to make the all-star team fairly, they would be 10 games ahead of the pack.” (The Reds would go 80-74 and finish in fourth place, 15 games behind the pennant-winning Braves.)
One fan, Harry Washer, a former Xavier University football player, threatened a federal lawsuit over the Redlegs’ dismissal from the all-star team, saying, “It’s not my fault that people in other cities don’t bother to vote for their team players.” (Washer’s lawyer was a former college swimming champion and World War II veteran named Charles Keating, who would go on to a prominent career as an anti-pornography activist, particularly targeting Larry Flynt, and a white-collar criminal who went to prison for his role in the Savings and Loan financial scandals of the 1980s.) Washer ultimately abandoned his suit after Bell was picked as a National League reserve.
The Sporting News, which had renewed its call to do away with fan voting, doubled down once the results were announced. The suggestion was made that sportswriters should pick the all-star teams, prompting Redlegs manager Birdie Tebbetts to joke, hinting at the writers’ own biases and grudges, “Ted Williams might not make the squad.”
National League President Warren Giles suggested capping the number of ballots distributed to each major-league city. “Let the fans vote when they visit the ballpark,” he said. “In the end, we would have a team picked by the people who go to the games.” His American League counterpart, Will Harridge, was ready to do away with the fan vote entirely.
The all-star campaign turned out to be the last hurrah for the Times-Star, which was sold the following year to Scripps-Howard, the Cincinnati-based chain that owned the rival Post, and shut down. (The Times-Star building, a beautiful Art Deco masterpiece on Broadway, now houses county government offices.)
Early in 1958, Frick announced what just about everyone had seen coming: all-star teams would henceforth be selected by a vote of players, coaches and managers. “The fan poll was abandoned,” Frick said, “only after long consideration and with a great deal of regret.”
He added, “I’m in favor of the fan vote, if it can be done honestly. But the way it was, it was a joke.”
Frick left open the possibility that fans would get a vote again, but it wouldn’t happen under his reign.
Elected commissioner in 1969, Bowie Kuhn, who’d served as a lawyer for the National League, was serious to the point of austerity—“even his undershirt was stuffed,” wrote Dave Anderson of The New York Times. His tenure is probably best known for his ongoing conflicts with Athletics owner Charlie Finley and Major League Baseball Players Association head Marvin Miller. But one of Kuhn’s first actions as commissioner was to announce the restoration of fan voting for the Midsummer Classic.
The new system would avoid the previous missteps. A total of 25 million ballots would be printed and available at retailers and ballparks, with special allotments sent overseas for the military, plus a million for Canada, now home to a major-league team, the Montreal Expos. No news organizations would distribute or collect ballots, and if they weren’t official MLB ballots, they’d be tossed out.
The system worked, until voting ventured onto the newfangled World Wide Web in the ‘90s; it didn’t take long before people tried to fix the vote there. In 1999, Chris Nandor came up with a program to vote for his favorite Red Sox players, casting 40,000 votes, all of which were eventually disallowed.
In 2014, paper all-star ballots went the way of helmets with no ear flaps and the Montreal Expos. The following year, MLB disallowed more than 60 million votes, many of them from ballot box–stuffing Royals supporters, whose defense echoed that of Reds fans nearly 60 years earlier. “If you don’t like it,” said pitcher Jeremy Guthrie, “vote more.”
The technology may change, and the teams too, but stories like this are reaffirming. Nearly a century later, baseball’s All-Star Game still has resonance, and fans are still determined to do whatever they can to get their favorite players into the game.
“The whole concept of the All-Star Game is to match two dream teams for the fans,” Kuhn said in a 1979 interview with the Associated Press. “They’re the fans’ teams, nobody else’s. Not Bowie Kuhn’s, not the players’ and not the managers’.”
