MLB fan voting Inception: fans vote for . . . best fans!

Major League Baseball just issued a press release in which it announced the opening of their website, sponsored by Esurance, where fans can vote for “best hitter” and “best pitcher” and “best rookie” and stuff like that. I don’t much see the point of such “awards” and I’m guessing that, league orders requiring winners to say they are honored notwithstanding, I doubt the players see much point to it either.

In addition to all of those, MLB and Esurance has a new category for this year: Fan of the Year.

This year, Esurance and Major League Baseball are celebrating the start of awards season with an all-new award: “MLB Fans of the Year presented by Esurance.” The award recognizes baseball fans in a completely new way and empowers them to vote for their favorite team’s biggest fan.

“Empowers” can be translated to “makes fans flock to our sponsored web page, but let’s allow MLB to have its nuance. Anyway:

Once on the website, fans will choose between four Fan of the Year nominees per club. Fans’ votes will be cast via posts on Twitter by including a desired nominee’s unique hashtag. Voting percentages will be available throughout the voting period showing in real time where each nominee stands. Fans can vote as many times as they want throughout the course of the voting period and the nominee with the most hashtag uses will be declared the winning Fan of the Year for their club. Each winner will be part of the inaugural class of MLB Fans of the Year.

Which is much the way they handle the Clemente Award, so you know this is a sacred and hallowed honor. Or maybe it’s just a gambit to drive traffic. Who can say?!

All I know is that Major League Baseball has become addicted to fans voting on stuff. Now it has fans voting on fans. That’s some “Inception"-level stuff right there.

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