AZ SnakePit awards season begins: Play of the Year nominations open

It’s time to start working towards the AZ SnakePit awards, which have been handed out each year since 2006 - here’s the full list of recipients. We’ll (more or less) be doing one per week, starting with the Play of the Year award. Here’s what the schedule will be:

• Through December 1st: Play of the Year
• 4th-8th December: Single game Performance of the Year
• 11th-15th December: Game of the Year
• 18th-22nd December: Rookie of the Year
• 25th-29th December: Unsung Hero
• 1st-5th January: Pitcher of the Year
• 8th-12th January: Most Valuable Player

With the exception of Play of the Year, the format for each week and award will be similar. Monday sees an introductory post, which is also an open call for nominations. Anyone can suggest a candidate, and highly rec’d items will be taken into consideration by the awards committee i.e. me. Wednesday sees the poll, typically with five or so nominees. Voting for these awards will be open to registered SnakePitters only, after some... ah, interesting ballot-box idiosyncrasies last year! The winner will then be announced on the Friday.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting goes. Some of these have obvious front-runners; others, not so much. There may even be a credible case for “No overall award” again in the Rookie of the Year category, since there were few eligible players to have much of an impact on the team. We’ll see how it works out though.

Play of the Year

For this category, we’re going to do it differently. There will be five preliminary rounds, each gathering together nominees of similar type:

• Saturday: home-runs
• Sunday: pitchers and catchers
• Monday: corner infield
• Tuesday: middle infield
• Wednesday: outfield

The winners of each preliminary round will move forward into Thursday’s final poll, where those five face off against each other to decide the overall Play of the Year. I’ve got a list of potential candidates, which I wrote up during the year, but I’m certainly open to other suggestions, since we’ve got 25 slots to fill! The MLB Video page is a useful resource, if you can remember the player but not the specific play. If you can include a link to the specific play in your comment of nomination, that’ll be looked upon favorably by the awards committee. :) If you see a play mentioned you want to support, hit the rec button.

As mentioned above, we’ll start tomorrow with the home-run preliminary poll, so get your nominations in as soon as possible...