And the Pozcar goes to …

Posted: December 11th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 14 Comments »

OK, well, the blog sort of took a hard right turn there with the Royals signing Jose Guillen and the BBWAA zaniness and all. I want to once again thank my good friend, the classy Bob Dutton for taking time to answer some questions. He’s been pretty well besieged with interview requests lately (here’s another one on Maury Brown’s site if you just can’t get enough Bob). I thought he was very generous to take the time to answer questions. Not everyone would.

But it’s time to get this blog back on track and doing the stupid and pointless things we’re supposed to be doing. And that’s why, tonight, we are introducing our own awards. We modestly will call them the Pozcars.

You are now no doubt saying, “Wow, Joe, that’s really a clever name, what with the way it sounds like Oscars and all, boy I never would have come up with that. Please tell me how exactly will these Pozcars will work.”

Well … OK, I have no idea. I haven’t really thought that far ahead. I’m still patting myself on the back for the name. Fine, let me set a few basic ground rules:

1. We at the Pozcars have absolutely no problem with the Players Association using the Pozcars for incentives in their clauses. In fact, we strongly encourage it. I am hoping that most Pozcars voters will be open to taking bribes. I’m hoping Curt Schilling himself will BE a Pozcars voter. Then he could earn himself the $1 million by voting for himself (although knowing Curt, he would probably would NOT vote for himself just to confuse everyone).

2. We will not release the ballots for each voter because that would take way too much work.

3. We will be more than happy to do a big and grand television production for the Pozcars if any producer is interested. My wife suggests that Paul Rudd would make for an excellent host, though I would be more than happy with baseball fan Alyssa Milano (if you’re out there Alyssa, call me, we’ll talk).

So now for the good part — who gets to vote in the Pozcars? Well, here’s where I am hoping to cash in on various friends and acquaintances I have managed to glom onto in the past, along with so many of the talented and opinionated people on this site.

Voters I intend to invite (if you see your name on this list, yeah, I plan on inviting you): Jim Banks; Dave Barry; Alex Belth; Will Carroll; John Dewan; John Donovan; Bob Dutton; Dave Eggers; Sean Forman; Bill James; Rany Jazayerli; Keith Law; Ryan Lefebvre; Alyssa Milano (call me!); Rich Lederer; Rob Neyer; Dave O’Brien; Jeff Passan; Scott Raab; Michael Rosenberg; Paul Rudd; Curt Schilling; Joe Sheehan; Bruce Springsteen; Jayson Stark; Mike Vaccaro; Darren Viola; several unnamed scouts and lots of other really famous people I would rather not name for various legal reasons!

Now, I know that as you loyal readers look at that list of people who will undoubtedly and rudely turn down their opportunity to vote for the Pozcars, you are thinking: “Gee, I’d like to turn down that opportunity too!”

Well, unfortunately, I can’t invite you all. So here’s what we’re gonna do. Thanks to the magic of gmail, I have created a special email All you have to do is send me an email saying why you would like to be a Pozcars voter, and assuming that your reason is good enough (it would be hard for me to imagine a reason that would get you turned down), you too may be an official Pozcars voter. Maybe we’ll get T-shirts made.

Anyway, we’ll vote via email on all the big awards. And we will start right away with the new Hall of Fame ballot. You have until the end of the week to submit your “I wanna be a Pozcars voter” request. I’m hoping to send out an email early next week which will have a Pozcars Hall of Fame ballot and all the rules. I’ll post it here on the blog as well. Then you can vote for the Pozcars or report the email as spam or whatever. Isn’t this exciting?

If you are a big-money producer who wants to put the Pozcars on television, you can just email me directly.

(For those of you who have ordered bookplates, thank you. Some of those went out in the mail today. Believe it or not the requests were so overwhelming that I have had to order more bookplates — and apparently the book is sold out on Amazon for the moment. I’m sure they’ll reorder. Anyway, we should get out the rest of the requests by the end of the week. And you still have time if you want to order the book for the Holiday. You can email your bookplate and stationery request here).

---