To Vote or Not to Vote

Journalists should be covering news, not making it. However, the minute the sports writer casts his vote for an end of the season award, a pre-season poll or any other ranking, he is directly affecting the outcome of it. He is affecting the very news that he will cover in the upcoming days.

Numerous newspapers, including the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times have already banned their sports reporters from casting votes for certain awards and/or polls. I argue that other publications need to follow suit.

The arguments on the other side are somewhat convincing. We’ll use baseball as an example here. Many argue that the beat writers who cover teams day in and day are the experts. They are the ones who have seen the players across the course of the season and have a great vantage point in which to compare talent. They know the statistics inside and out. Therefore, the argument is that there is no one more qualified than these “experts” to cast votes.

But is there a point in which this beat writer may lose his objectivity? Is he truly an expert on the sport, or does his allegiances lie with the team he covers? These are beat writers who, from the beginning of Spring Training until the end of pennant races and playoff games, spend a significant part of their time with the players and coaches of these teams. Therefore, is it possible for them to put aside these relationships and possibly friendships to cast an objective, non-biased vote for post-season honors? I am not convinced that it is all that easy to do so.

It is an honor to be among a select group of journalists to have the power to vote for postseason awards and rankings. But with that power comes the proclivity to abuse it. That power may be abused to feed the ego of the sports writer, or the integrity of the votes may be compromised to feed the needs and desires of specific teams and/or players. When a sportswriter casts his vote for a postseason award, he is essentially casting a vote with a multi-million dollar affect. Players have clauses in their contracts for bonuses contingent on postseason awards. Not to mention, winning an MVP Award, for example, will likely lead to more endorsements and an increase in public appearances. The bottom line: votes equal money. And when this money belongs to the player you have a strong relationship with or the team that you cover, objectivity may be compromised. There is a conflict of interest too strong to ignore.

On the other side of the coin, because the voting system is set up to make each voters’ votes public, sports writers may face criticism for their votes even if those votes have been made in an objective and honest manner. Fans - who are likely readers and a source of the newspaper’s profit – may object if the hometown writer doesn’t vote for the hometown player. Furthermore, if a player or a manager believe that he or the team should have received a high vote than you gave him, they have the power to diminish your access and the amount of information that they are willing to give you. There are too many toes that can be stepped on and too many parties with a vested interest in the votes for writers to have to jeopardize their ability to cover a team simply to exert the power to vote.

When I worked as an associate reporter for the Atlanta Braves with MLB.com last summer, I dealt with a great group of players. Well, all but one: Jorge Sosa. To put it honestly, Sosa was a pain to deal with. It never ceased to amaze me how he could speak English after a solid pitching outing, but had to silently disappear for a translator after blowing a save. He would usually never return. Members of the media dreaded having to try and waste their time trying to get information out of him, as Sosa was never willing to go out of his way for anyone in the media. Now Sosa was lucky to still be in the Majors midway through the season with the way he was allowing home runs leave the park. But imagine for a moment that he had been a star on the team. Imagine that he were, say, a star such as Barry Bonds or Albert Belle, one of those players who despised the media and who the media rolled their eyes at in return. When it comes time to vote for awards, does the media’s propensity to like certain players over others play a role in how votes are cast? As I ask myself that question, I am skeptical that it does. Going back to my example of Sosa, had he and pitcher John Smoltz been in contention for the same award and had comparable statistics, I wonder if I would be able to completely put aside my dislike for Sosa and my great relationship with Smoltz and vote objectively. I wonder if maybe the unparallel access that some use to justify the beat writers voting may actually be the source of an unjust bias.


If you take away the writers, then who should vote? I argue why not the baseball fraternity itself? Have current members of the Hall of Fame vote on new members. Who should be a better judge of talent than those who are among the game’s elite of all times. And as for postseason awards, I argue that managers should be the ones to cast the votes. Some will argue that managers have an even stronger alliance to a team than do writers; however, I don’t see this as getting in the way of their objectivity. You see coaches voting in NCAA football and basketball polls all the time. And if you were to compare these coaches polls with corresponding AP polls, you won’t find many discrepancies. If college coaches can put aside their allegiance and vote objectively when recruiting and postseason tournaments or games are at stake, then I argue, so can Major League Baseball managers.

In a 2005 column in which San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Tim Sullivan wrote about his decision to abstain from using his voting privileges, he brings up another risk writers now face. Because we are in the midst of a steroid era in which certain players and records are under scrutiny because of the possibility of performance enhancing drugs, a writer’s decision on whether or not to vote for Mark McGwire on the Hall of Fame ballot or for Barry Bonds on the MVP ballot is putting that writer in a position to make a judgment on whether or not McGwire, Bonds and others used performance-enhancing drugs. Sullivan writes: “Neither should I accept the responsibility of deciding whether Mark McGwire is still entitled to the presumption of innocence following his clumsy evasions before Congress…Better to recuse [sic] oneself than to render a judgment based on unsubstantiated suspicion. Better to stick to the sidelines than to get in a game in which you never really belonged.”

There are too many risks to credibility and too many traps set to eliminate objectivity for sports editors from newspapers to allow their writers to continue voting for awards. This may mean shaking an institution and a tradition that has been in place since the mid-20th century; however, in doing so, sports writers may gain much more than the power they may feel that they are losing. Randy Harvey, the sports editor of the Baltimore Sun, justified his decision to ban his writers from voting with this humorous, yet thought-provoking analogy: “You know, I wouldn't want baseball players voting on the Pulitzer Prize winners, so I'm not sure why we should be voting on baseball awards.”

Sources:
“Most Valuable Sayers” http://www.onthemedia.org /transcripts/2005/11/18/08
“Voting for baseball honors, ‘Ron Mexico’ test ethics of sports coverage.” http://talkingbaseball.wordpress.com/2005/12/20/voting-for-baseball-honors-ron-mexico-test-ethics-of-sports-coverage/