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Baseball is trashing the paper All-Star ballot

Los Angeles Dodgers v Philadelphia Phillies

PHILADELPHIA - MAY 24: An usher holds up All Star Game ballots during a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Los Angeles Dodgers at Citizens Bank Park on May 24, 2014 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Phillies won 5-3. (Photo by Hunter Martin/Getty Images)

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I’m sure someone, somewhere is lamenting this, with said lament being nothing more than an exercise in nostalgia, but good for baseball for joining the 21st century: Major League Baseball is getting rid of the punch card paper All-Star Game ballots.

As the story notes, a memo was sent out to team presidents to this effect. All balloting will now be online. Which is fine given that over 80 percent of all All-Star votes were submitted online already and tens of millions of printed ballots went unused. Getting rid of the ballots saves paper. It also saves the labor of the poor stadium workers who had to toss all of those discarded and unused ballots which littered ballpark aisles and concourses after every game between April and June. Really, we’re all disgusting pigs who treat ballparks like they’re our own personal trash cans. It’s good that some of our slop is being taken away.

I’m guessing some of you, in addition to the nostalgia stuff, will lament the loss of paper ballots by arguing that the online ballots have made a mockery of All-Star voting. To which I’ll say (a) paper ballots lend themselves to ballot box stuffing too, even if it’s a slightly more quaint version of it; and (b) the continuing insistence of Major League Baseball to tie home field advantage in the World Series to the results of the All-Star Game does far more to make a mockery of baseball than some hacker in Pacific Northwest creating a program to shoot 50,000 votes to, like, Dustin Ackley ever will.