All-Star voting gives Yankees new reason to absolutely despise Blue Jays fans

New York Yankees first baseman Ben Rice is having an MVP-type season. Yankees fans were expecting Rice to keep improving in 2026, but this? The 27-year-old Rice has exceeded nearly all expectations. He's genuinely emerged as one of the best pure hitters in the sport.

Rice is leading the American League-best Yankees in almost every offensive category. He's fourth in the AL in home runs (19), third in OPS (.998), and second in slugging percentage (.611). He's easily been the best first baseman in the AL.

And yet, when the results of the first fan ballot for All-Star voting were revealed on Monday, Rice wasn't the leading vote-getter at first base in the American League. That honor belonged to Toronto Blue Jays star Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who exceeded Rice by nearly 100,000 votes.

Yankees first baseman Ben Rice is learning the hard way how unfair MLB's All-Star fan voting system is

Despite having played in fewer games than Guerrero, Rice is besting the Blue Jays star in nearly every statistical category offensively. Some of the categories aren't even remotely close. Rice has 19 homers to Guerrero's three, 47 RBI to Guerrero's 27, and a .998 OPS to Guerrero's .737. What are we doing?

Well, what we're doing is fan voting, which is more of a popularity contest or a function of fame than it is a reflection of recent baseball performance. By the way, let's not act like Guerrero hasn't established himself as one of the greatest talents in Major League Baseball. He certainly has, and his 2025 postseason was majestic. Fans in Toronto absolutely love him for it.

But we've turned the page on a new season, and when it comes to the 2026 MLB All-Star Game, players should be judged by their performance in this 2026 season, not by anything they've done in the past.

Yankees fans just gained more resentment for Blue Jays with Vladimir Guerrero Jr's All-Star votes

Of course, none of the hundreds of thousands of Blue Jays fans who voted for Guerrero in recent days care at all that he's been underperforming this season. He's already endeared himself to these fans to the degree that they'll vote for him every single season, even if he happens to be batting .150. There's some beauty in this loyalty, but on the other side of that coin is baseball injustice for a guy like Rice, who ends up falling behind in a race that he wholly deserves to be ahead in.

While Yankees observers complain about the situation, there are even some Jays fans out there who are admitting how ridiculous this is. Still, it's a tough problem to solve without doing away with the fan vote entirely. How else could you "punish" or even critique a fan base for supporting its guy through good years and bad? Normally, this would be viewed as a virtue, but the All-Star voting process has turned it into a vice.

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