:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/photo_images/4300350/128004581.jpg)
With Ian Kennedy having romped to an expected and entirely justifiable victory in the Pitcher of the Year category, it's time for the final award: Most Valuable Player. After some discussion and counter-arguments on both sides, I've decided to stick to the "Player" aspect of the label, and exclude coaching and front-office staff from the formal balloting. However, there is a supplementary question, just for fun, and I'm curious to see how that shakes down. I've also changed the voting process and, like the Oscars, we've also expanded the nominees to ten - chosen by averaging WAR from Fangraphs and Baseball Reference. That gives us these names (alphabetical order):
| Name | fWAR | bWAR | Ave. WAR |
| Josh Collmenter | 2.2 | 2.5 | 2.35 |
| Daniel Hudson | 4.9 | 2.6 | 3.75 |
| Ian Kennedy | 5.0 | 5.5 | 5.25 |
| Miguel Montero | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.40 |
| Gerardo Parra | 2.8 | 1.9 | 2.40 |
| J.J. Putz | 1.7 | 2.2 | 1.95 |
| Ryan Roberts | 3.6 | 3.4 | 3.50 |
| Joe Saunders | 1.0 | 2.4 | 1.70 |
| Justin Upton | 6.4 | 4.1 | 5.25 |
| Chris Young | 4.6 | 4.8 | 4.70 |
Details of each nominee (largely copy/pasted from earlier awards, since most of them have already been to the rodeo this awards season!) and the ballot after the jump.
Balloting
Rather than just having you pick one name, I'm going to do things a little bit closer to the BBWAA balloting.
Please rank the ten candidates in order of "most valuableness", from first to last. "1" is most valuable, "10" is the least valuable.
The award will be given to the person with the best overall score: note that malformed ballots e.g. voting all candidates as 1 or 10, will be very easily discarded from the results. Additionally, at the end, there's still a "pick one" option that includes non-players: our pitching coach Charles Nagy, manager Kirk Gibson and GM Kevin Towers, all of whom certainly played an important role in the 2011 Diamondbacks.
This one's going to be very interesting. While all ten were solid contributions, and are duly honored simply by being nominated, there are two obvious candidates, that I expect to see battle it out. I'm curious to see the arguments put forward for each by their supporters, and also how the actual rankings shake down behind them.