The Kansas City Royals And How To Steal An All-Star Game

There has been plenty of talk about why eight Royals shouldn't start for the American League in this year's game—talk that's amused or exasperated or awestruck or profoundly annoyed. There hasn't been a lot of chatter on how this bizarre phenomenon, which is presently threatening to make Omar Infante an All-Star starter, came to pass.

The team itself barely knows what to make of it. "It's almost like 29 years of frustration is just exploding over these last several months," said Toby Cook, VP of community affairs and publicity for the Royals.

The Royals, during a long and desolate era, went ten years, from 2003 to 2013, without more than one All-Star. This one All-Star's presence on the roster was typically the result of the league's mandate that every team being represented at the game. During this ten-year stretch, such titans of the game as Mike MacDougal, Ken Harvey, and Mark Redman all represented the team at the Midsummer Classic; Redman had an ERA of 5.27 when he did the honors. Being chosen for the All-Star team from the Royals took on a curse-like aspect—after his selection, Redman went 6-13 over two seasons before washing out of the game; Harvey made just 48 MLB plate appearances after his 2004 selection. They weren't cursed, of course. They were just Royals.

But those Royals are not these Royals. These Royals are fresh off a World Series run and comfortably in first place in the AL Central, and a fan base that went three decades thirsting for the postseason is now chugging royal-blue Royal Kool-Aid by the gallons.

Cook said the organization went into this season knowing, because of the team's high-caliber candidates and the inaugural year of online voting, that there was an opportunity to see the team strongly represented this summer.

"We actually have players who you could make an argument for at several different positions who could either be all All-Stars some day or should be all All-Stars now," Cook said. "So we threw a lot at [promotion]."

This promotional onslaught came from all levels: social media, broadcasts, in-person at the park—everywhere a Royals fan would want to go to get information about the team and #VoteRoyals is there. The team pushed voting early and pushed it often. On April 29, the team changed its Facebook banner photo to promote the voting. Kansas City had played all of 21 games at that point.

Other teams with All-Star candidates, such as the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Angels, did not make similar moves until late May and early June. This allowed the Royals, despite having some of the lowest social media followers out of all the majors—the team has fewer than one million likes on Facebook and 380,000 followers on Twitter; the Detroit Tigers, for example, are at 2,262,460 and 676,000— the team's early effort made the initial difference. It should be no surprise catcher Salvador Perez has a commanding first-place 10.2 million votes to Stephen Vogt's 4.3 million in second. The Royals organization, fueling a feverish fan base, simply pushed voting harder and earlier. "This year we have a little more fire in our belly because we have candidates," Cook said. "We've kept the pedal down the entire time."

But still, with a market size in the bottom fifth of the league, other teams should be able to rally and surpass the Royals. That would be the case, anyway, if the team wasn't putting up the best regular season television numbers baseball's seen this decade. According to Fox Sports Midwest, the Royals have a 12.3 household rating in the Kansas City market right now—up 127 percent from this time last year. This means an average of 113,000 households are tuning in to the Royals in Kansas City each night, fifth highest across the league, despite being the 31st-smallest market in the country. The 12.3 rating through May is the highest since the Boston Red Sox in 2007. And yet this still doesn't quite explain how things got this lopsided.

It makes sense that the x-factor, in the era of online voting, is the vast gray space of the chat rooms, Facebook groups, and fan forums that comprise this campaign's grassroots. What started as a mindset of 'our team should be represented' has mutated into a major league trolling effort.

At the Official Facebook Kansas City Royals Fan Club, the nearly 13,000 members debate the campaign daily. The tone is, on balance, triumphal. "Is Kansas City the only city with internet access to vote???? Quit your whining," one member said.

The Royals' MLB.com forum boils with heated discussions on the ethics of the voting. "Might as well make a mockery of the All-Star voting system to force MLB to make changes," another fan said.

"Don't worry guys, you're only possibly costing yourself home field in the World Series," groused another user.

Royals blogs like Pine Tar Press and Royals Blue also draw attention to the phenomenon, without actively stoking it. "I don't understand why the fans of these other teams don't get their voting act in gear," said one blog post on Pine Tar Press. "If other fans don't like it, maybe they should try to do something productive about it."

Michelle Marzetta, a lifelong fan who moderates the Kansas City Royals Fan Hangout Facebook group, said it's simply the fans getting out and voting. "MLB allows this," she said. "They allow us to vote. There's no coaches, no managers, no owners [doing this]. This is all from fans voting."

Marzetta, much like the Royals organization, posts early and often to get the members of her group to vote. She sends out a reminder daily to vote Royals. "Royals fans are ridiculous right now," she said. "They love those guys."

Of course, many teams' fans feel this way about their players, but only the Royals fans have managed to do what they've done. It's doubtful that they've done it entirely cleanly—MLB officials vaporized millions of fraudulent votes last week, and a Royals fan meme gives one broad sense of how this sort of low-risk, low-reward voter fraud would work.

More sinister—or, anyway, more sketchy in a mostly consequence-free way—is the fact that some baseball writers' email addresses appear to have been used to cast 35 ballots for the Kansas City slate. Both the prolific freelancer Wendy Thurm and Jesse Spector of the Sporting News have tweeted what looks like proof of this over the last week. Spector's votes appear to have been cast, if not by Spector, a day after he wrote a column advocating changes to the voting process as a result of the Royals ballot-box push. "I don't think my column had anything to do with it," Spector says, "though who knows which Royals fan did it. Lots of writers got it around the same time."

In an election that means something, this sort of frank fraud would be troubling. In one that could, at worst, hand Omar Infante an inning of action that he hasn't remotely earned—and cost the Royals' owners a bunch of money in bonuses—and possibly swing home field advantage in the World Series, it's more of a live-and-learn quirk, or glitch, or at any rate a thing that will doubtless be ironed out in years to come. "It's kind of crazy, the voting, isn't it?" Royals manager Ned Yost said on 610 Sports, a Kansas City sports talk radio station. Yost had previously said that "there's nothing wrong" with Royals fans voting. It is, and there isn't. It's ridiculous, but this is a game.

And, however dodgily they're playing it, it might just be that Royals fans are playing this game better than everyone else. After three decades of losing baseball, it's hard to be too angry at Royals fans for making up for lost time. After all, Major League Baseball has been trying to sell the All-Star Game as a Thing That Matters for years now. It's hard to fault the people who care about the Royals for taking them at their word.