Phillies Web Site Laughably Requests All-Star Votes for Non-Pitchers

I don’t know if this is obvious, but the Philadelphia Phillies are my favorite professional baseball team.  Even if the players are bad, I want them to get better.

So when it comes to All-Star ballots, no one’s is more waylaid with debatable Phillies votes than mine.  But that makes sense.  I also often vote for Orioles who have no business infiltrating the highly esteemed and rarely questioned nature of baseball’s All-Star Game.

Which isn’t to say that no one on either roster deserves to go, but.  But.  Well, you know.  I can’t vote for David Wright in anything but “Who should wear this harness as it is slowly lowered into a volcano?”

Nobody laughs harder than the usher who collects my ballot, if that ever happens anymore.  But the Phillies openly campaigning for the likes of John Mayberry to make the team sort of feels like the mom who gets her kid to little league practice on time every night, cheers the loudest, challenges people to fights who snicker when he somehow strikes out swinging and looking at the same time, and takes him out of school to hit the cages.  You know, that mom.

Of course, it’s a league wide push by each team’s site to get people voting so guys like Mayberry and Will Venable and Bryan LaHair (who “..finally made a Major League  team’s Opening Day roster” this year) maintain that very polite hope that maybe they’ll get to play with guys who’ve contributed meaningfully if the iVoteCounter malfunctions, becomes self-aware, and goes on a killing spree.  Some say it’s inevitable.

We’ve spent the first part of this season accepting that our victories will be ground out of pitching performances, watching as those victories went the other way and became what’s known in baseball as “humiliating losses.”  Beat writers churn out stats that make our stomachs drop as the pitching staff fights through the groans.  We fire scathing insults across Twitter about our favorite players as they strand a runner at third with no outs.  And then, in late April, after three weeks of debunking them entirely, we’re asked to cast them our sweet precious, precious All-Star votes.

So, get out there, Phillies fans!  Or stay where you are and use a computer.  This corpse-like offense twitches occasionally!