Barry Bonds Voted to Start All-Star Game - Or Was He?

So we are supposed to just accept the fact that Barry Bonds went from being 119,000 votes down to winning the final outfield position in the All-Star game for the National League by a margin of 123,000 votes. I'm sorry but I'm going to have to call shenanigans on this one.

Barry Bonds is perhaps the most disliked player in baseball. No player gets booed as badly as Barry when he plays on the road. I'm thinking that there's no way Barry got voting support from around the country. I guess we are supposed to accept that those close to a quarter-million last-minute votes came in from San Francisco.

Bonds beat out Alfonso Soriano for the final spot. Soriano plays for the Chicago Cubs - a team with a pretty rabid national fan base. Soriano was red hot in June - batting .336 for the month while hitting 11 HR. With Soriano getting this hot you would think the momentum in voting for him would increase at the end and not cool off enough to let Bonds catch and pass him so easily. Yet this is precisely what we are supposed to believe - that support for Soriano cooled off just at the time that Soriano was playing his best.

The All-Star game is in San Francisco this year and the biggest story in baseball is Barry Bonds pursuit of Hank Aaron's all-time home run record while at the same time having a huge cloud of steroids suspicion hanging over him. My guess is that the powers that be did not want to "honor" Barry Bonds by adding him to the All-Star game roster. It seems just so much more convenient to have him "voted" in by the fans - that way baseball bigwigs can say it was the fans who wanted him at the game not them. Would anyone put it past Bud Selig to manipulate the voting totals? I mean used car salesmen are known for their integrity - right?

It wouldn't be the first time that a pro league played with the All-Star game vote totals (see this year's NHL All-Star game). When you add everything together - Barry Bonds being voted in just doesn't make sense to me.

The whole situation just smells fishy.