ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - The worst suspicions harbored by Yankee fans were true. In an attempt to swing the close vote for the American League's All-Star shortstop in Nomar Garciaparra's favor, a 25-year-old computer hacker from Carver, Mass., cast around 25,000 votes on the Internet for the Red Sox star on the last day of balloting.
But relax, Red Sox fans, your man apparently beat Derek Jeter of the Yankees fair and square. The computer police entrusted with sniffing out corruption did their job, according to Alex Tam, director of Major League Baseball's web site (mlb.com). Chris Nandor, who used a computer programming language to circumvent limits on how many times a person could vote on the Internet, was caught in the act, Tam said.
''Between the 25th and 27th of June, 25,259 votes for Garciaparra were rejected,'' Tam said last night. ''The same person also voted for [Scott] Hatteberg, [John] Valentin, and [Jose] Offerman.''
Nandor, Tam said, had tried this once before. ''We know all about him,'' Tam said, reeling off Nandor's name, address, age, place of employment, and computer number. ''On May 19, he voted 14,702 times for Garciaparra. We caught all of them and filtered them out.
''Nothing is foolproof. But if you're talking about the average high-end hacker, we think we can catch them.''
Nandor, who didn't know his votes were thrown away until last night, thought he'd done a big favor for Garciaparra, according to Jon Orwant, a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab and editor-in-chief of the Perl Journal, Perl being the computer programming language Nandor used in his attempt at chicanery in cyberspace. Orwant and Nandor are friends.
''I've examined his program and can confirm that it would have stuffed the ballot box,'' Orwant said in an e-mail message to the Globe, to whom he had indirectly provided a tip about Nandor's activities.
''These programs are easy to write with Perl. In broad strokes, the way his program worked is that it pretended to be a human being visiting the All-Star web site, where it would click on the appropriate buttons and fill in nonsense for the different fields (e-mail address, city, state, zip, etc.).''
Major League Baseball rules limited Internet users to 22 votes, which equaled the number of times All-Star ballots were distributed in major-league parks. What prompted Nandor to weigh in with far greater numbers?
''A couple of weeks ago I was at Fenway with some people, watching the Red Sox go through an 11-run first inning against the White Sox, and we were having a great time and talking about all the different players, and the upcoming All-Star game,'' Nandor wrote in an e-mail message. ''Someone mentioned Nomar was falling behind. So I decided I would go home and try to help Nomar win.
''I think in large part I did it just because the All-Star game was going to be in Fenway, so I felt Nomar deserved a start on his home turf, with the incredible season he's had. I still might have done it if the game had been in New York, but it makes me feel good to have this justification for my actions.''
But what apparently did in Nandor was a certain amount of laziness uncharacteristic of his hero, Garciaparra. In his first attempt, in May, Orwant said, Nandor used the same e-mail address. His last attempt, in June, he used the same phone number (111-222-3333) and Zip Code (11111). Nandor wrote that he set his computer to run repeatedly, then went to a barbecue.
Because he didn't vary those basic bits of information, the systems administrators at CBS Sportsline, the Internet site that conducted the voting on the Web for Major League Baseball, caught on quickly, Tam said.
''Sportsline developed the ballots with numerous safeguards in place,'' Tam said. ''They look at all the results on any given day and scan for patterns. They also have a way to scan for Perl scripts. They were very well aware of him from Day 1, and blocked him out.''
So instead of what could have been the worst All-Star voting scandal since 1957, when Cincinnati fans voted eight Reds as starters on the National League team, leading commissioner Ford Frick to take the voting away from the fans altogether, MLB claims a clean election.
Jeff Gehl is president of The Marketing Center, the counting house that tabulated the All-Star votes for Major League Baseball. TMC is based in Brookfield, Conn., with offices in Weymouth, Mass., and Newport Beach, Calif.
Gehl said yesterday the Internet accounted for less than 20 percent of the vote. Most of the ballots counted in the last week were cast at WalMart and Pepsi-Cola outlets.
''There were several million ballots, and they were sent in one lump sum at the end of the program,'' Gehl said. ''We had three shifts working last weekend, processing the ballots.''
Attention, WalMart shoppers: The brand of choice, evidently, is Garciaparra, who was in third place in the voting until the last batch of votes were counted.
Orwant, for one, remains unconvinced that the system can withstand a clever hacker.
''If they claim their system is foolproof, they're wrong,'' he said. ''I'll prove it to them next year.''
