With the Major League Baseball All-Star Game once again set to take center stage on Tuesday night (8 p.m.), it marks the 15th anniversary of a truly great Midsummer Classic. The 1999 All-Star Game, held at Fenway Park, will be remembered for a myriad of reasons. The All-Century Team, Ted Williams’ introduction while finally tipping his cap, Pedro Martinez dazzling the baseball world by striking out five of the six batters he faced.
One aspect of the ’99 Fenway game has largely been forgotten, though it certainly bears remembering. Chris Nandor, a Red Sox fan who lived in Carver, Massachusetts, hacked the MLB online voting, and cast his ballot for Nomar Garciaparra more than 39,000 times. Garciaparra, who at that point trailed Derek Jeter for a starting spot at shortstop, received Nandor’s hilariously clever votes, though it also eventually spread to Scott Hatteberg (pre Moneyball fame), Jose Offerman, and John Valentin (all of whom got 25,259 additional votes to their names).
Using the programing language Perl (Nandor later coauthored a book on it), he hilariously ran the “script” while grilling burgers one afternoon at his house. Amazing stuff, though it was eventually noticed by MLB website officials. Depressingly (for the officials), it took them two whole weeks to figure it out, even though all 39,000 of Nandor’s Nomar votes (along with the others) had the same email address and zip code.
The aspect of the whole thing is that dates it the most? Nandor accomplished his bit of hometown help by using a dial-up internet connection. Luckily, no one picked up the home phone while he was running his script.
Clearly the league learned from this experience, which like so many other major institutions, took some time to acclimate to the internet. Perl, the coding language that Nandor used to tip the scales in his favorite team’s favor, was (and still is) useful for tasks such as data-mining, or running scripts (which was done in this case to perfection prior to being noticed). That said, it’s been largely usurped in many of its original functions by more modern languages.
Nandor was 25-years-old at that time, but had no idea that, perhaps even more than some of the players who eventually took the field in the 1999 All-Star Game, he would leave an indelible mark on the Midsummer Classic.
Last note: Nomar didn’t end up needing the extra votes. He won the conventional way, and started the game in front of his hometown Fenway fans.
Bonus: You didn’t really think we could run a post even subtly alluding to the ’99 All-Star game without including vintage Pedro, did you? Still amazing:
Screenshot via YouTube
