Report: MLBPA rejected league's proposal to change All-Star Game voting

A proposal from Major League Baseball that would have changed the voting process for this year's All-Star Game was rejected by the MLB Players Association last month, sources told Joel Sherman of the New York Post.

Currently, fans vote for the starting position players in both the American and National League through a simple ballot process online, checking the names of their choices with the highest vote totals getting the starting honors. The league's idea was to split voting into two rounds using social media: first tallying all vote totals up to an agreed-upon cut-off date (perhaps around mid-to-late June), at which point all but the top three vote-getters at each position would be dropped from the ballot, allowing for a runoff election featuring only the three finalists at each spot.

But the players' union said no to the idea, even rejecting MLB's offer of $1.1 million in incentives to be split among players who finished top-three in votes, plus the Home Run Derby participants and members of the winning league in the midsummer classic. The MLBPA wanted an equal split of revenue gained from the change in voting process, Sherman reports, and its refusal to budge on that request prevented the change from taking effect this year.

Officials from both MLB and the players' association refused to comment on the report.

This development comes after a winter of tense relations between MLB and its union, during which the sides butted heads over a variety of issues that included a very slow free-agent market and the enacting of new pace-of-play rules by commissioner Rob Manfred.

The 89th edition of the All-Star Game will be played on July 17 at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.