The Great Royals Scourge of 2015 has caused Major League Baseball to take a closer look at the All-Star voting, which for the first time ever is completely online. A Kansas City Royal leads every category save one outfield position, which belongs to Mike Trout. Kansas City was a great story last year, reaching the World Series in thrilling fashion—their first postseason appearance in 29 years. It was fun and surely old fans were reenergized and new fans joined the party. Still, Omar Infante might be the starting second baseman at the All-Star Game and that is…hinky.MLB Advanced Media has been vigilant in tracking the legitimacy of votes; Bob Bowman told Ken Rosenthal they monitor for programs, IP addresses, and the like to make sure everything is on the level. But Bowman also told Yahoo's Jeff Passan that there are obviously holes in the system, which seems obvious given several writers around the baseblogosphere have noticed that their emails have been used to cast votes—specifically for the Royals—without their knowledge.
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Approximately 300 million votes have been cast, which does not include the 60-65 million votes that MLB tossed out. So out of 365 million votes, 65 million were found to be somehow fraudulent. That's 18 percent, which seems really high, but it falls in line with what Bowman told ESPN. MLB's routine monitoring turns away about 20 percent of votes each season.So what is happening here? Is everyone in Kansas City just super jazzed for the Royals and it's spreading like the flu? Is Kansas City a hub of sophisticated computer hackers like its partner in statehood, St. Louis? Some teams in larger markets are experiencing down years (looking at you, AL East), so is this just a perfect storm of all of these factors?Maybe? All anyone seems to know is that it is weird."I'm not saying we bat 1.000," Bowman said. "But it's between 60 and 65 million votes that have been canceled. We don't really trumpet it because if someone thinks they're getting away with it, they'll try to again."
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"We scrubbed these first set of numbers incredibly thoroughly," Bowman said. "We said, 'Can this possibly be right? Look at all these votes for Kansas City.' It just didn't turn out that way.