AZ SnakePit 2016 Award: Play of the year nominations open

As last year, the pattern for all the awards will more or less the same:

• Open call for nominees
• These will be reviewed by the selection panel (me, plus possibly Mrs. SnakePit if I need a second opinion), and condensed into a short list.
• There’ll be a post listing and discussing the nominees, with a poll
• Most votes wins.

We start here, and what I need are nominations for Play of the Year. This is not limited to defense, but can also cover hitting, base-running, managerial decisions - hell, fans in the stands or mascots. I’ll even listen to arguments that “Firing Dave Stewart” should be an option.

I have a list which I put together over the course of the year, but it’s bound to be incomplete, since I didn’t exactly watch every inning of every game this season. Indeed, looking at the list, I appear to have missed the entire month of July entirely. Either we had no decent plays that month, or I simply lost the will to watch. Considering we went 7-17 in July, either is entirely plausible!

If you can find video [http://m.mlb.com/video/ is a good place to start] of your nomination, so much the better, but if your search skills aren’t up to it, you can just date and describe the play, and I’ll see if I can fill in the gap. If you see any worthwhile nominees, give ‘em a rec. The most rec’d suggestions will be folded into my own list, and will go into the voting process next week.

Due to the nature of this beast, we’ll do as we did last year, and have four or five groups, with the winners of each poll advancing to the grand final. I’m not sure whether to do this by date, or gather together similar plays, e.g. left infield, right infield, outfield, offense and miscellaneous. I’ll take opinions on that as well.

Either way, those groups will run Mon-Fri next week. We’ll then take a brief pause due to the winter meetings, and have the final poll on Friday Dec 9. Thereafter, we’ll do one category a week: Monday = suggestions, Wed = nominations, Fri = winner announced.

Let the discussion begin!