Voting For Manny Probably Won't Matter

Who said social activism was dead? We're living in the Age of Obama, which means everyone is all jazzed about public service, and there's no better way to voice your displeasure with the bureaucracy of Major League Baseball than to... vote Manny Ramirez into the All-Star game!

Consider Jason Rosenberg, the 39-year-old founder of the Vote For Manny b-log, a social rebel. After reading that the suspended Dodgers star — yes, the real one — was fourth in All-Star voting, Rosenberg took to the interwebs and made a site to urge fellow purists to vote for Ramirez and bring attention to the absurdity of Major League Baseball's PED policy. But people misinterpreted the site as a nest for Manny fanboys, which forced Rosenberg to clarify his position. A vote for Manny, you see, is a vote for hope and change. And who doesn't love that?

The perfect storm is on the horizon: Manny being elected a starter in the ASG. A vote for Manny is merely a statement to MLB that the rules need to be changed. It's not a vote for Manny, the player. Sure, the LA fans might actually want to see Manny, but that only highlights the point earlier; fans root for the laundry.

Then Rosenberg used his 15 minutes on the bully pulpit to inform his new readers how he would change the All-Star Game, so I surfed over to Buster Olney's blog, where he pointed out the futility of the grassroots movement's inspiration.

All of this (plus Ramirez's performance on the field in the last two months of last season) will make Manny a very formidable candidate in the weeks ahead. If you are waiting to see if the commissioner is going to step in and say, with some fair logic, that all players suspended for the use of banned substances or performance-enhancing drugs are ineligible for baseball's midsummer classic, well, that almost certainly is not going to happen. Such a policy would have to be collectively bargained between the owners and the union.

Either way, both Rosenberg and Olney point out, Ramirez isn't likely to play in the All-Star Game. His teeth will probably hurt, or something like that.

Fan starts "Vote For Manny" Web site [ AP] The Manny candidacy gains stream [ Buster Olney] A bit more on "Vote For Manny" [ It's About The Money, Stupid]