Online balloting data map gives us interesting look at close All-Star voting races

Mark Townsend
·Yahoo Sports Contributor

Kudos to MLB.com for their hard work in putting together an All-Star voting distribution map that gives us a very interesting look at how the tightest All-Star voting races have played out over the final week of balloting.

The data provided is specific to online balloting and it examines three close races in the National League: The catching battle between Yadier Molina of the St. Louis Cardinals and Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants, the second base race between Matt Carpenter of the Cardinals and Brandon Phillips of the Cincinnati Reds, and also the third base battle between David Wright of the New York Mets and Pablo Sandoval of the Giants.

The example above shows us the final online voting map in the Posey-Molina battle. As you can see, the interactive maps allows fans to select any county in every state (Canada's percentages represent the entire country) to see how the voting broke down.

For example, Molina took home nearly one-hundred percent of the votes in St. Charles County in Missouri, which should surprise no one. If you were to move out closer to San Francisco, you'll find that Posey dominated the vote there, but Molina did wind up with roughly three to four percent in most of the surrounding counties.

I see you, Oakland A's fans.

If you want, you can also look back as far as July 1 to see how the voting breaks down on a day-by-day basis. It's actually a very cool system they came up with. It may not tell all of the story, but it does give us a very interesting look at where the votes are coming from. Hopefully we'll see more of this as the Final Vote begins following Saturday night's announcement of the All-Star rosters.

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