In Dash for Final 2 All-Star Spots, Baseball Teams Devise Online Campaigns

In Dash for Final 2 All-Star Spots, Baseball Teams Devise Online Campaigns

The Final Vote winners were David Freese of the St. Louis Cardinals and Yu Darvish of the Texas Rangers, Major League Baseball announced on Thursday. Out of a total of more than 50 million votes cast, some 600,000 came via Twitter; during the four-hour window for Twitter voting, 9 percent of votes were cast as Twitter hashtags, the league said.

The Chicago White Sox created a Twitter hashtag, #TakeJake, to promote Jake Peavy.

In another sign of the growing power of social media for marketing purposes, Major League Baseball will add Twitter to the ways that fans can cast ballots in its annual Final Vote contest to select the last two players for the All-Star Game lineups.

Since Final Vote began in 2002, all voting has taken place digitally, whether on the Major League Baseball Web site, mlb.com; on the sites of the teams to which the players belong; or through text messages.

On Thursday morning, mlb.com announced that for the first time, voters will also be able to cast ballots via Twitter. The Twitter voting — via posts that include the designated hashtags for the 10 competing players — will be conducted during the final four hours of voting, from noon to 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday.

The use of social media like Twitter and Facebook to encourage fans to vote “really started to escalate” in the last three years, said Matthew Gould, vice president for communications at the MLB Advanced Media unit of Major League Baseball in New York.

Adding voting directly through Twitter reflects how such tactics are “now commonplace,” he added, as well as how many players “are active on Twitter.”

Ron Washington, manager of the Texas Rangers, is among those in baseball who are trying to get the vote out for players trying to make the All-Star team — in his case, the Rangers pitcher Yu Darvish.

The All-Star Game teams were announced on Sunday. The next day, the managers for the American League team and the National League team each picked five players who are to compete during Final Vote.

Fans then got a window from Monday through 4 p.m. on  Thursday to vote for players— one from the American League and one from the National League — who join the rosters for the All-Star Game, which will be played in Kansas City on Tuesday, July 10.

“This is the next natural step,” Mr. Gould said. The results will be assessed to help determine what role Twitter may play in Final Vote in 2013.

The compressed time period for voting also works in favor of social media assuming a greater role in Final Vote, though it still means that teams must scramble to create campaigns that last three days to drum up votes for their eligible players.

“Twitter has become a huge piece of this,” said John Blake, executive vice president for communications of the Texas Rangers, who is seeking votes for a Rangers pitcher, Yu Darvish. (The hashtag is #VoteYu.)

“It’s amazing how this is now driven by social media,” Mr. Blake said. “Our director of social media, Kaylan Eastepp, is spending every waking hour coming up with ideas.”

Among them, so far, are designating Tuesday as “Yu-esday”; creating a poster in which Ron Washington, the Rangers manager, who is also the manager of the American League in the All-Star Game, poses like Uncle Sam and tells fans, “I Want You to Vote Yu”; asking fans to vote for Mr. Darvish at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m., reflecting his uniform number, 11; and giving away T-shirts “when we hit 500 retweets for one message,” Mr. Blake said.

Clearly, stirring interest on Twitter makes sense even before the Twitter posts are counted as votes.

The Rangers are joining with a National League team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, to promote votes for their players. The D-backs’ player is Aaron Hill (#FinHillVote).

Likewise, the Baltimore Orioles in the American League have teamed up with the Washington Nationals in the National League for a “Beltways Ballot” joint promotion. The Orioles’ player is Jason Hammel (#VoteHammel) and the Nationals’ player is Bryce Harper (#BryceIn12).

The rest of the American League players, and their hashtags, are Jonathan Broxton (#VoteBroxton) of the Kansas City Royals, Ernesto Frieri (#VoteFrieri) of the Los Angeles Angels and Jake Peavy (#TakeJake) of the Chicago White Sox.

The remaining National League players, and their hashtags, are Michael Bourn (#VoteBourn) of the Atlanta Braves and David Freese (#FreesePlease) of the St. Louis Cardinals. The National League now has four Final Vote contenders rather than five because on Tuesday one of the five, Chipper Jones of the Braves, was added to the roster of the All-Star Game as a replacement for an injured player, Matt Kemp of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

NYtimes