Mike Celizic

Baseball wants me to vote for the All-Star teams, which is a nice thing for the game to do. But it doesn’t want me to vote just once. It wants me to vote 25 times.

It’s not really a request or even an invitation. If I want my vote to count as much as the next fan’s, I have to vote 25 times. More likely, I have to vote 50 or 100 times — just to have the equivalent of one vote.

And the whole purpose isn’t more fan involvement, but to get into your electronic pockets. Quite frankly, it stinks.

Political elections are run on the one person, one vote system, except in Ohio and Florida. Baseball’s All-Star vote is effectively the one computer, 25 votes system. Or, more accurately, one e-mail address, 25 votes, because the system keeps track of your e-mail address.

So if I want to cast a ballot and I want my candidate to get the full benefit of my vote, I am forced to vote 25 times, because that’s what everybody else is doing.

But I don’t know anyone with just one e-mail address. Most people I know have a minimum of two — one at home and one at work. And most of them have at least four or five, including the one they use when they’re chatting in places they’re not supposed to be.

Anyway, if you really care about voting for your favorite All-Star, you have no choice but to sit at the computer and do it 25 times. Then you have to register again under a different e-mail and do it again. And again. And again — until your one vote has turned into more than 100 so that it can have the same value as all the other votes.

I am totally in favor of the fans electing all-star teams. They’re the ones who buy the tickets and the replica jerseys and the t-shirts and the $8 beers and everything else that makes the game the lucrative business that it is. Since they’re paying the freight, they have the right to pick the players they want to see in the All-Star game.

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In the old days, it was fun to sit in the stands during a game and fill out one of the ballot cards that you got at the gate. Some people, eager to get their home-team heroes on the team, filled out stacks of cards, which I always viewed as cheating, but at least they had to work hard to get all those ballots in.

Not so today. Now, you just fire up the computer, go to MLB.com, and find one of the several tabs inviting you — pleading with you — to vote for the All-Star team. It even says, “vote up to 25 times.”

To the utterly naïve, it doesn’t make any sense. If one person can vote 25 times, everybody can vote that often, so why not save everybody a lot of time and allow just one vote per person?