MLB should bring back paper All-Star ballots

I miss the now-extinct paper All-Star punch ballots ushers handed out to fans from 1970-2014.

You want to know what I miss about going to a baseball game pre-2015 and sitting in the stands on a perfect day like June 25 was at Progressive Field?

I miss going to games without having to take a bothersome cell phone in my pocket. I miss hearing Herb Score on the radio and listening to him saying, “Fisk swings — grounder to Carlos Baerga at second. Baerga guns it to Eddie Murray for the third out of the inning. That’s 4-3 if you’re keeping score.”

I miss the Zum Zum vendors who would walk the aisles of old Cleveland Stadium shouting, “Peanuts! Get your peanuts here, four bags for a quarter!” The peanuts, six or seven in a bag, came in these tiny white paper sacks stapled at the top, and sometimes if you ripped the bags open too forcefully, the peanuts would fly out like paper snakes confined too long in a tin can, leaving you with 15 cents worth of peanuts — unless you wanted to pick them off the dirty concrete around your seat and eat them anyway.

And I miss the now-extinct paper All-Star punch ballots ushers handed out to fans from 1970-2014. Golf tees were handy for poking out the little square next to the player’s name you chose to vote for.

Voting by paper ballot was a good conversation starter with the guy in the next seat, especially during a game as boring as the one the Indians lost, 4-0, to the Twins on Sunday as Minnesota completed a three-game sweep of the Tribe to take back first place in the A.L. Central. You’d punch out five or six ballots, shove them into the Gillette-sponsored cardboard ballot boxes conveniently located on the concourse, and head home, happy to do your part to keep America strong.

Three years ago, the politically correct MLB decided to eliminate paper voting. Fan voting now is all digital at MLB. com.

The decision to do away with the paper ballots was made, according to MLB, after only 4 million paper ballots were cast in 2014; another 16 million went unused.

“We therefore have made the decision to go green, while also saving the cost of managing an offline program,” baseball’s president for business and media Bob Bowman wrote in the memo on March 9, 2015.

The number of ballots that will be cast digitally this year with the voting deadline four days away is difficult to project, but as

of June 21, Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge already received more than 2.6 million votes, so that 4 million figure will be crushed.

“Technology has changed so much, fans have to get used to it,” said Baerga, who happened to be in the Tribe clubhouse before the Indians played the Twins.

“Voting for the All-Star game is a big thing. Now you have more chance. You don’t have to come to the ballpark for those punch cards. You can vote from your house. I voted for the guys on my phone. I think it’s better this way.”

Of course voting on your cell phone is fine, but it is so impersonal – like a couple that goes out to dinner and scrolls through their phones instead of conversing.

There is no tradition in clicking on a mouse repeatedly to increase Francisco Lindor’s vote total at shortstop. In the latest tally, Lindor is about 350,000 votes behind Carlos Correa of the Houston

Astros.

I admit I had to be dragged into the 21st century.

After Twitter, I am social media-challenged. I say MLB should renew punch ballots so those in my age demographic can have our three inch-byseven inch paper security blankets.

What a world. What a world.