Your Ballot for the 2014 Player of the Year

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the creation of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, which we created to recognize the single best performance in a given season, regardless of the position the player plays or the league that he plays in. Just one award for one player, with everyone eligible, and all players measured on the strength of their own performance.

In that post, we announced that the voting panel would include 11 members of the FanGraphs staff, myself included. Today, we’re amending that slightly, as I am recusing myself from the voting panel this year, as our plan to reveal the winner — and all of our balllots — on October 20th means that my participation would reveal some of the order of the NL MVP ballot which I cast over the weekend. In order to avoid that issue, I’m surrendering my vote for the Player of the Year Award this season. To replace me on the panel, we have chosen to give you guys a ballot instead.

Before I link to the ballot, though, I need to explain the grading process that we have attached to the system. While the ballot does contain a normal 1-10 ranking system, we have added an additional evaluation layer, with a 0-100 grade also being recorded for every player you list on your ballot. The grade is actually the more important number than the ranking on the ballot, though both will be tabulated, and the player’s average ranking will be used as a tie-breaker, so position on the ballot matters as well. But the grade is the more important evaluation, so let me walk through how the grading scale works.

The grade represents your estimate of the percentage of years that the player’s performance in that season would result in his placement at the top of your ballot. The baseline, or a grade of 100, is the kind of season that would result in a Player of the Year Award in almost any year throughout baseball history. These kinds of grades should be reserved for types of performances that go down in baseball history as the best seasons of all-time: Babe Ruth in his prime, Ted Williams hitting .400, or turn-of-the-century Pedro Martinez, for example. These performances would result in a Player of the Year award in nearly 100% of the seasons in baseball history.

In more normal seasons, the best performance might belong to a player whose performance would only win the Player of the Year Award 60 to 80 percent of the time; it’s still a great performance, but would get beaten out by a player having a legendary year. It is perfectly acceptable for the top player to get a grade that is not particularly close to 100, as this scale is not designed to follow the traditional grading scale used in education. It is an estimate of the number of of times, out of 100, you’d expect the player to be the best player in the league.

By the time you get to the bottom of your ballot, you may placing very low grades on players, perhaps even as low as zero. If a player is legitimately the 10th best player in a season, it is perfectly rational to believe that it would be extremely rare for his performance to result in a Player of the Year award, and a grade of 0, 5, or 10 does not reflect that he had a poor season; you are recognizing his strong performance by simply including him on the list in the first place. Do not be afraid to use the entire scale if it reflects your belief about the strength of the player’s performance.

The grade will allow us to not only see the differences in your opinion beyond what a numerical order will show, as well as allowing for comparisons across years. In some years, the player who finished second or third in the voting may very well have a higher aggregate grade than a player who wins in a different year. Consider your grades carefully for all 10 positions on the ballot, as the system is designed to recognize even those who happened to have fantastic seasons in a case where someone just happened to be even better in that year.

So, in effect, we are asking you to not only measure a player against his peers this season, but against players throughout baseball history. In some years, we might even have a winner with a grade of 30 or 40, if it’s a particularly weak crop of elite players and no one has a truly outstanding year. In other years, we might have multiple strong candidates, with several players receiving very high grades, and we can acknowledge the greatness of even the runner-up by utilizing this system.

We also understand that this is an estimate, and it’s an unfamiliar scale, so perhaps we all won’t be very good at estimating probabilities to begin with. It’s possible that our scales could change over the years, and maybe we’ll become more lenient or more harsh with our grades as time goes on. We don’t expect this system to be perfect, especially in year one, and we’re not claiming that this is going to be the definitive way to compare players across different seasons. We just think it’s worth measuring the extra data point of how strongly you feel about a player’s performance in that season, and we think this is an interesting way to gather that information.

The winner will be the player with the highest aggregate grade across all of the ballots, with your ballots counting as one collective vote. In the case of a tie, we will use the highest aggregate ranking, so if you’re putting the same grade on several players — a completely valid thing to do — use the order of the ballot to determine your preference among players with the same grade. And remember that you are free to use the entire scale; a grade of 0 is not a knock against a player’s performance, as you are rewarding that player simply by placing him on the ballot, putting him ahead of the hundreds of players who didn’t make your top 10.

We will tabulate all the ballots and announce the full results of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award on Monday, October 20th, the day between the League Championship Series and the World Series. We hope you enjoy participating, and we hope you put some real thought into your ballot. Feedback is always appreciated, especially as we learn about how this process will work together, so feel free and provide comments below, and we will take those into account.

And now, for the ballot. Most of the text above is included on the page, as well as a chart which shows the frequency of seasons per year in which a certain WAR threshold is achieved. Of course, this is not the WAR of the Year award, and you do not have to consider WAR in any way in your voting if you do not want to. My theoretical ballot had many disagreements with our published WAR, for instance, and we strongly encourage you to base your decision on more than just decimal differences in WAR. The chart is there as a guide, however, to give you an idea of how often a certain level of accomplishment is reached, so you can have context for how rare your evaluation of a player’s performance is in the historical context.

Alright, have at it. The FanGraphs Player of the Year Award ballot can be found here. Make your vote count.