Vote for Players of the Game
After each and every game this season, you’ll have the opportunity to vote for the players of the game:
You’ll be able to award 3, 2, and 1 stars (3 stars being the best) to whichever players you think are most deserving and then we’ll tally the votes in real time. The ballot will open as soon as the game is “Final” and it will remain open for the following day as well, but then it will be closed permanently.
After each week we’ll tally up the votes and award a FanGraphs fan chosen player of the week, month, and season.
This is a collaborative project with Tangotiger and insidethebook.com.
Check out our live win probability pages as soon as the game ends to vote!
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David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Hockey style game awards. I like it.
Very nice. Great work, Mr. Appelman.
Nice.
Great idea… but for the sake of clarification, in hockey the best player is the “first” star of the game and the third best is the “third” star… It looks like the template above has the best player receiving three stars so it may be confusing.
We’ll see how it goes. For FanGraphs more stars = better.
Make sure you state it clearly, or there is going to be one heck of a Canadian outlier to your data.
Just looking at the votes that have come in, I think everyone gets it.
If Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia get out-voted by Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla, we’ll know we have a “Canadian Outlier Problem.” Otherwise, I think it’s a safe bet the residents of America’s Hat are smart enough to figure it out.
This is nice, good addition!
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Let Me Vote lol.
new to the site, but I really like this idea
Neil Diamond really deserves some credit for giving his all out there tonight.
did anyone anticipate Brett Gardner’s arm being this bad?
Cool idea, but it’s not letting me vote…
Are you logged in to your account?
Actually… I see what the problem is, but this is kind of out of my hands. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
Nevermind, fixed!
Sorry, first time I’ve been back on the site since I posted that. I’m logged in, but the interface is telling me that I still have to log in to vote, and it’s not letting me interact with it at all, neither the menus nor the links. It basically is just an image…
Lance W, you’ll need to go to the game page to vote, for instance:
http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2010-04-05&team=Rangers&dh=0&season=2010
Still can’t vote.
Are you logged in, do you have cookies enabled? Votes are coming in, so might be tough to trouble shoot the problem.
I’d try logging out, logging back in, then if that doesn’t work, clearing fangraphs.com cookies and trying again.
Interesting idea. But isn’t everyone just going to vote for the highest WPA players?
I guess the analysis I would want to see at the end of the season is: of players who were chosen as the stars of the game, but were NOT the highest WPA players, why were they chosen? Were certain players chosen more often regardless of WPA, certain types of players, certain events?
Well, Joe Morgan and Co picked Pedroia as the obvious star of the game, though by total WPA, Youkilis was higher (and by quite a bit). Chicks still dig the long ball, and so do some analysts… and some folks here at Fangraphs too, no doubt. Just as the FANS projections aren’t just duplications of CHONE, or of a repeat of the last season. Not everybody just votes the party line (or even looks at it).
Of course, Pedroia played a more valuable position, which you could definitely argue matters.
Not that Joe Morgan would.
But in this one game, did Pedroia’s defensive play make enough of a difference to overshadow Youkilis? He may get the positive positional adjustment on average, but what happens in any particular game can be wildly divergent from that average.
It will also be interesting to see how votes are possibly biased by which team wins.
If you actually watch the game (please, please don’t let this make me sound like one of those guys), you’ll definitely see things you could argue as valuable that WPA doesn’t pick up. Key defensive plays, defensive failures that make the pitcher look better than he should be, extra bases picked up that were more difficult than WPA would suggest, etc.
I think you could also argue against giving the leverage of situations that much weight.
I agree, if you don’t watch the game, you probably just go by WPA. But I think if you are watching you’ll very often come up with opinions that may run counter to WPA and for entirely logical conclusions. I, for one, will only be voting on games I see.
Yes, defensive play is definitely a huge aspect that either doesn’t show up in WPA or may even get get erroneously attributed to a pitcher — was that crucial high-leverage late-innings double-play merely the routine result of a groundball pitcher doing what he does best, or was his bacon saved by a spectacular defensive webgem?
I didn’t choose Posada, because, even though he did more than enough offensively to seem worthy, he let the go ahead run score on a passed ball.
I voted for Posada. Thanks, man!
I think this is great!
I just have a suggestion on the interface. Maybe it’s just me, but it felt less than intuitive finding who I wanted to pick in the drop-down list. It would feel more intuitive to display the attributes being sorted on first. For instance:
COL – Jimenez, Ubaldo (P)
COL – Stewart, Ian (3B)
instead of:
Ubaldo Jimenez (P / COL)
Ian Stewart (3B / COL)
I’m sure now that I recognize the sorting, I’ll have no trouble, but it was a bit disorienting the first time.
are you going to be recording these throughout the year.
example:
at the end of the year i can check ryan howards stats page and see that he has accumulated 300 stars. and then have a leaderboards based on how many stars they have?