Baseball Bloggers Alliance

You may have seen me reference the Baseball Bloggers Alliance from time to time.  You may have noticed that it's been added to the top of the blog as its own page, after expanding so much that the blog roll couldn't handle it anymore.  So, what you might be asking is, what the heck is this thing?

Of course, regular readers to this blog are familiar with the United Cardinal Bloggers, that intrepid group of bloggers who put up with way too many e-mails from me and get together to do various projects, including our weekly radio show.  Hold that thought while I bring something else into the mix.

If you were reading this blog before the season (hey, both of you!), you may remember when I had the preseason Playing Pepper series, where I interviewed a blogger from each team, asking them questions about the upcoming season.

Take those two ideas, mix them together with a little tweak, and you have the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.

The BBA, as you can read from the mission statement in the page linked above, really has a couple of purposes.  One is to get bloggers from every team (and some that cover baseball in general) to connect, to be able to use each other as a reference, to have someone to go to when you want to know if Zach Greinke really has been that good or what to look for in the upcoming Reds/Cardinals series.

The secondary purpose, one that I'm really excited about seeing how it works out, is to vote on our own post-season awards and compare our results to the baseball writers' official selections.

For years, people have complained about the writers and how they cast their votes, if we even know.  Did this guy vote for that player?  Is he voting for him because he has X number of wins or has he looked deeper?  What makes Player Y valuable?

The BBA is taking the same approach to these awards as the writers do.  There will be a maximum of two votes from each team chapter.  (For example, St. Louis has three blogs involved, but only two of us will vote on the Rookie of the Year, to pick one at random.)  The votes will be tallied on the same point system as the writers.  The difference is, the ballots of the BBA will be public.  You'll be able to see who voted for who and, most likely, the blogger will explain why in his or her post.

Right now, the BBA has about 73 blogs.  Stan Musial's Stance, Pitchers Hit Eighth and yours truly make up the St. Louis representation.  Bloggers can post their ballots anytime from the end of the season to the deadline for each award, so you should be seeing some of these start popping up in the next couple of weeks.

We've also gotten a website up and running and many of the member bloggers are reposting their stuff there. So if you want a quick way to keep up with what is happening around MLB, I'd suggest bookmarking that one.

If you are a blogger and are interested in joining the group, you'll find an e-mail at the website that you can use to get involved.  You may or may not be able to get into the voting procedures next time (depending on how many blogs there are for your team) but we'd love to have you in the mix anyway.


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