By the time you read this, you will have only around 12 hours to fix a terrible injustice.
Online fan voting to determine the starting position players for the MLB All-Star Game on July 14 closes today at 11:59 p.m.
There have already been 163 million online votes, according to MLB.com, which is apparently a 15 percent increase to this point compared to a year ago.
I realize a person can vote 25 times (which doesn't really make any sense to me, but that's another issue), but that still means there were more than 6.5 million people signed up. Even if people are signing up under multiple e-mail addresses, we can all agree this amounts to a reasonable sample size.
That leads to my next point.
Baseball fans are either too stupid or too homer-ish to pick their own All-Star starters.
This is especially true when you consider people use All-Star starting selections as a way to compare different players or argue points for Hall of Fame selections.
Let's take a look at one perfect example of a swing-and-a-miss pick currently being made by fans and hurting a player from a Florida team.
You know who is the leading vote-getter in the American League as of Tuesday, according to MLB.com?
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter.
Let me get this straight - I enjoy watching Jeter play. The worst off-the-field press he usually gets is for dating too many models off the Maxim Top 100 List. That's a problem I'd like to have.
But I'd venture to say Jeter, who is the only AL player with more than 3 million votes, shouldn't even be starting when the two leagues square off at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
In 70 games, the 35-year-old Yankees captain is hitting .307 with nine home runs, 32 RBI, 17 stolen bases and has a .832 OPS.
Now, let's take a look at the player second among voting for AL shortstops: Jason Bartlett of the Tampa Bay Rays.
In 59 games, Bartlett is hitting .362 with seven homers, 36 RBI, 17 stolen bases and .960 OPS.
Try to imagine if you didn't know which stats went with what player. Bartlett's batting average is 55 points higher, and in 11 fewer games he has only two fewer homers, the same number of stolen bases and four more RBI. Oh, and an OPS more than 100 points higher.
Remember that Jeter plays his games at a much more hitter-friendly park in the new Yankee Stadium compared to Bartlett's Tropicana Field.
There really is no way to back up Jeter starting at short other than the fact he plays in big-market New York and the fact that he has more All-Star selections (nine) than Bartlett has years of MLB experience (six).
The 16 starters (eight position players on the AL and NL squads) determined by fans will be revealed at 1 p.m. Sunday on TBS.
But today, you still have a chance to make things right. Don't wait until it's too late.
Tick tock.
