Jayson Stark is Not Good at Math When It Comes to Royals and All-Star Voting

The Royals and the All-Star Game voting has led to plenty of gnashing of teeth and nonsense. This tweet by Jayson Stark is the latest entry.

This is one of those bad tweets which on the surface seems like “whoa,” thanks to the vagaries and excesses of All-Star voting online, and the makeup of the Royals’ fan base.

In his column that ran today, where the world is indeed collapsing upon itself, he also added this:

"Seven Royals are in line to start the All-Star Game? Holy Balboni. That’s an amazing tribute to the fans of Kansas City, who are out there voting for their boys at a rate that computes to 31.6 ballots votes for every man, woman and child in the metroplex — including newborns — but … They need to know something: This isn’t good. It isn’t good for baseball. It isn’t good for the All-Star Game. It isn’t even all that good for Kansas City in the long run. It’s actually a mess."

There are a few things at play here.

First, one ballot can vote for 9 different players on the same ballot in each league.

Second, you are allowed to vote up to 35 times with one e-mail address. And so theoretically, someone with multiple e-mail addresses, and the motivation to hit the “submit” button can vote many more times.

Third, the Royals are a regional team, with a broadcast range much larger than the Kansas City metro area, and fans throughout parts of Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska and that include other cities like Omaha. [below is the Facebook Fan data for 2015, based on which team has most fans in each county].

Since the voting is no longer at the stadium only, fans who watch on TV are probably more likely to vote (particularly when the team’s broadcast and Facebook page is pushing it).

So rather than just using city Metro data, where you would conclude the Royals would have way fewer fans than teams like the Angels, Mets, and White Sox based on metro size, even though those teams share a market, let’s use the Facebook data by team.

The Royals have 940,000 likes on the Facebook page. The White Sox are at 1.6 million. The Angels have 1.2 million. The Mets, in a metropolitan area with a population about eight times larger, are at 1.1 million. While those teams check in ahead, a look at market would lead you to believe there was a greater imbalance.

So, what percentage of involvement would we need to see from those Facebook fans of the team (assuming they are voting straight “party ticket”) in order to achieve this voting?

Let’s start with the 72.6 million votes. Those are spread across all the players, and one ballot can vote for up to 9.

72.6 million divided by 9 = 8.07 million ballots

But then let’s assume every ballot is submitted 35 times under one e-mail each, which is fairly easy to do and doesn’t take much more time than filling the first out.

8.07 million ballots divided by 35 ballots/voter = 230,571 voters

Knowing that the Royals have 940,000 Facebook fans, then 24.5% of those Royals fans active on social media would have had to vote, exactly one time and max the ballots, in an organized campaign to achieve the numbers.

These take several things out of the equation. It’s possible for example, that not all fans of the Royals vote for all 9 players. It’s also possible that fans of other teams cast some votes for Royals players. (We know these things are true since Salvador Perez has 3.5 million more votes than Omar Infante). Finally, it’s pretty plausible that people motivated to vote with multiple e-mail addresses did so, and further reduce the percentage of connected social fans who had to vote to make these numbers possible.

So yeah, we can do something about this massive 35 ballots per address thing, but it’s all funny math. It has nothing to do with the size of the Kansas City market and whether infants are voting.