The vote is in

No doubt about it: Baseball is the new international pastime

"It's just not fair!" With his distinctive high-pitched voice, ESPN baseball analyst Harold Reynolds was in the zone recently on Baseball Tonight. The former player -- and capable analyst -- was lamenting the All-Star ballot totals of the two leading vote-getters among American League outfielders: Ichiro Suzuki of the Mariners and the Yankees' Hideki Matsui. "It's not fair when you've got a whole nation voting for these guys."

It was Tuesday evening, one day after Major League Baseball announced that Matsui was not only surging at the plate but also in the hearts of online All-Star voters. The previous week he had trailed talented Twins outfielder Torii Hunter by 185,000 votes. In a span of seven days he had passed Hunter like a chin-high fastball, posting 1,038,784 votes -- 300,000-plus more than Hunter, who was suddenly in fourth place and all but out of the running for a starting spot in the AL lineup.

Ichiro led all AL outfielders with 1,618,015 votes. Heck, he led all players by the length of a Barry Bonds dinger -- nearly 350,000 votes ahead of the closest vote-getter, the powerful Yankees second baseman Alfonso Soriano.

Of course, you know that Ichiro and Matsui are Japanese. And, yes, they are deserving All-Stars. (Matsui only recently; after a slow start, he's now the leading Yankees hitter among everyday players with a .300-plus average, and he's second on the team in RBIs.) But Reynolds was in a lather over the notion that fans in Japan apparently were spending a lot of time on mlb.com voting for their favorite countrymen and, it seemed, their favorite countrymen's teammates. (A Yankee was among the top three at six of the seven positions, and Mariners DH Edgar Martinez, with 1.1 million votes, was one of only eight players in either league to reach seven figures.)

As Reynolds continued making his argument, not one of his colleagues -- neither the show's host nor former Mets manager (and scapegoat) Bobby Valentine -- jumped in with support. One of the commentators noted that there were myriad ways a player could be selected to the All-Star team. The inference was that if some deserving player was dissed by the fans (there has to be a Japanese word for dissed), he could still be selected either by the players and coaches (who are participating in the balloting this season for the first time since 1969) or by his respective manager, with a nudge from commissioner Bud Selig. But Reynolds wouldn't get off the plate, saying again how unfair it was that a country with "8 billion people" could stuff the balloting.

Hello, Harold! Ballot-stuffing in sports is as American as booing the umpire! It happens in ballparks throughout the country, where fans are encouraged to vote for their local stars. During my days long ago covering the NBA, there were rumors of teams hiring workers to poke the holes out of several ballots all at once using pencils (this led to the use of computers that eliminated ballots if they detected too many consecutive entries similarly punched). To infer that the passion of Japanese voters is somehow untoward is not only jingoistic and wrong-headed -- and dangerously close to racist -- it's naïve. In fact, the behavior of those online voters from Japan and other Asian nations is distinctly American.

Reynolds' suggestion also fails to acknowledge that baseball is no longer merely America's pastime. (In fact, you might concede that it's more Latin America's pastime than ours.) And that the influx of Asian players -- more than a dozen were on opening-day rosters -- has provided a much-needed boost to the game, both on the field and, perhaps more important, at the bank. Baseball owners' pockets surely will be fattened by the sales of jerseys and other MLB paraphernalia, and by selling this huge new fan base to global sponsors.

When the final count of the record 4.5 million ballots is revealed on Sunday, Ichiro will be the leading vote-getter for the third straight season. But could everybody please take a deep breath? When the American and National leagues square off in a couple of weeks at U.S. Cellular Park in Chicago, there likely won't be more than four All-Stars of Asian descent among the 64 players on both rosters -- each of them as deserving of the laurel as their teammates. That's not exactly an Asian Invasion. Not fair? No, it's more than fair. It's the American way.

Roy S. Johnson is an assistant managing editor for Sports Illustrated. His "Pass the Word" column appears on SI.com every Friday. Catch Johnson on CNN Headline News every Thursday at 3:40 p.m. ET.

 

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