It’s that time of year again, baseball fans; time to vote for your MLB All-Stars. Go to MLB.com to vote; you can vote up to 25 times per email address.

It’s always interesting to me to see these voting results. Over in the National League, my boy Albert Pujols is the leading vote getter and rightly so. But the real surprise is that Milwaukee fans have been getting the vote out so far. Ryan Braun and J.J. Hardy are the leading vote getters at their positions and six of their teammates (including second baseman Rickie Weeks, who is out for the season) are the second-leading vote getters at their positions. Rock the vote, Brewers fans. The real controversy in the National League is whether or not Manny Ramirez, who is currently ranked 4th among NL outfielders in fan votes, will garner enough ballots to earn a start in the Mid-Summer Classic. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Manny was suspended earlier this month for 50 games for violating the league’s performance enhancing drug policy. What do you think? Should a suspended cheater like Ramirez be allowed the privilege of participating in baseball’s midseason pageant show? If the fans vote him in, shouldn’t he be allowed to play? I have my own opinion here (I say no way should he be allowed to participate) but this is the problem with fan voting. There should be some sort of baseball IQ test before you’re allowed to vote in this thing. It’d be a shame for Manny to start at the expense of a guy like Raul Ibanez, who is having a career year in Philly, or Adam Dunn. But I digress. (For complete NL voting results so far, click here.)

Over in the AL, Derek Jeter is mystifyingly the leading vote getter. Not that I have a problem with Jeter; he’s a clutch player, a gamer, one of the few players today that I’ll let my kids emultate. But the fact that he’ll get the starting nod over Tampa Bay’s Jason Bartlett drives me crazy. To date, Bartlett is hitting 75 points higher than the Yanks captain, with more runs scored, RBI, stolen bases and an equal number of home runs without the luxury of playing his home games in the bandbox that is New Yankee Stadium. Look, I’m a realist; I get the fact that fans want to see stars in the game. As great a season as Jason Bartlett is having, he’s not quite the gate attraction Jeter is. I get that. But this is just my ideological philosophy when it comes to All-Star voting: the best players get my vote. Period. Cold. Hard. Numbers. Hopefully Bartlett will at least be selected as a backup.

In the American League Outfield, the geriatric Ken Griffey Jr. is the 4th leading vote getter, trailing teammate Ichiro Suzuki by a mere 1,400 votes. Seriously. The dude has 12 RBI. He’s batting .218. Why do we let fans vote on this stuff? Meanwhile, Baltimore wunderkind Adam Jones is nowhere to be found among the Top 15 AL OFers. (For complete AL voting breakdown, click here.)