Omar Infante may get voted into All-Star Game

Omar Infante may get voted into All-Star Game

If you haven't been following it, the KC fans have been stuffing the ballot boxes.

"The Kansas City fan base’s ongoing takeover of the All-Star process reached either its apex or its nadir on Monday afternoon, depending on your perspective. In the latest round of voting, eight Royals would start for the American League. The group includes Infante, who based on metrics both advanced and basic is the worst everyday hitter in baseball."

A similar controversy caused commissioner Ford Frick to overrule the 1957 all-star balloting in the National League, when Cincinnati Reds fans elected seven of their heroes to the team. Mr. Frick decided that perhaps Willie Mays and Hank Aaron deserved the honor more than Cincinnati outfielders Wally Post and Gus Bell.

That still left the Reds' infield of Johnny Temple, Don Hoak and Roy McMillan starting in place of Red Schoendienst, Eddie Mathews and Ernie Banks. Here's how those pairings finished the year in WAR:

Mathews 7.4 (3rd in the league behind Mays and Aaron); Hoak 3.7

Banks 6.4 (5th in the league); McMillan 2.6

Schoendienst 5.7 (9th in the league); Temple 1.3. Temple was sort of the Omar Infante of his own day. He finished the year with NO home runs and a mighty .341 slugging average. He hit just 22 homers in his entire career, which spanned thirteen years. To be fair, however, his OPS+ was 94 in 1957, just below average. Although Infante has been similar to Temple in his career, his OPS this year is a bottom-dwelling 41.

To give the devil his due, it should be noted that the previous year's edition of the Reds finished only two games out of first and was one of the most powerful teams in NL history, at least in terms of their ability to find the fences. They tied the (then existing) all-time record for most homers in a season. Five of their starters hit 28 homers or more while their super-subs (Smokey Burgess, Bob Thurman and George Crowe) hit 30 more in just 512 at-bats. They made an unorthodox and controversial effort to set the record by playing several players out of position during the season's final weekend. Manager Birdie Tebbetts had threatened to start slugging reserve outfielder Bob Thurman as his pitcher, but settled for a system in which he pinch-hit for the pitcher every single time. He ended up using six pitchers and six pinch hitters in the September 29th game. One of the pinch hitters, Smokey Burgess, delivered the record-tying dinger in the eighth, and the Reds even recovered from a 5-2 deficit to win the game by scoring six in the last two innings!