The article states that the league decided to cancel the votes because they suspected fraud in the voting. Individuals are allowed to vote up to 35 times per email address for the All-Star Game.
“It puts us in a hard spot,” Eric Hosmer told Yahoo Sports. “You won’t go on my Twitter and see, ‘Hey, vote for me and I’ll sign a bat and send it to you.’ We’re not trying to go out and advertise ourselves. Obviously, the team does stuff for us. But that’s what every team’s gonna do.”
FOX 4 spoke with Royals Vice President-Community Affairs & Publicity Toby Cook shortly after the announcement.
“We have no indication that it’s going to affect any of the ballot release that has been put over the past couple of weeks,” Cook said of the Royals who are leading the polls for the All-Star Game.
“The biggest deal that they’re trying to keep from happening is that a non-human is voting,” Cook said.
MLB has said all along that they have safeguards in place to keep fraudulent voting from happening, but said they became suspicious after the Royals had such a huge lead in votes according to Cook.
“From the reports that I had heard is that they detected fairly early on that this isn’t 100 percent pure,” Cook said.
Cook said he thought maybe the early lead in voting had to do with the Royals run in the World Series last season.
“When this first came out, and I don’t get surprise by a lot around here, but it kind of knocked our socks off that the Royals had done as well as they had from a starting stand point,” Cook said.
More than 300 million votes have been cast, and nearly half a billion are expected by the time voting concludes.
“My guess is that we’re going to have several different Royals in the All-Star Game when this is all said and done,” Cook said.
Courtesy of Fox4 KC.Com
