If it wasn’t for the lockout, today would be the first day without regular season Cardinal baseball. The Cards would be looking toward their first round matchup and we’d have a day or two to decompress before getting fired up for the postseason run that hopefully sends some legends out with more jewelry. The lockout changed the schedule, of course, and there are still three games left with Pittsburgh, but I wanted to go ahead and get started on one of the traditional fall aspects of this blog.
I started this opinion poll of the best Twitter accounts in 2015. It’s grown every year, from 26 people participating the first year to 190 last year. I’ve done it a couple of different ways but the current ballot method seems to have worked out the best and it is an easy way for people to give me their feedback about what accounts to follow. I think I add at least one or two to my timeline every year going through this!
This year, the ballot has 162 names. I took last year’s ballot, removed accounts that were deactivated (and some that didn’t seem to be active) and those that didn’t reach the threshold of appearing on 20% of the ballots last year, and added those that were written in last year plus a few others that had come to my attention over the past year or requested to be added when I put out the call in September. (By the way, you can read all the posts related to last year here and other years can be found in the “Series” section on the right side of the front page.)
One hundred and sixty-two accounts is a lot of accounts. Which brings me to the main point of emphasis I have about the voting.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO RANK EVERYONE ON THIS BALLOT! IF YOU HAVE NO OPINION ON THE ACCOUNT PLEASE LEAVE IT BLANK!
I really can’t emphasize this enough. I hate to see someone that basically voted for a few folks and then put a “1” (or a 5 or whatever) in everyone else. It skews the voting and the additional statistical work I do at the end of everything. Please, please, just skip those that you don’t know or have an opinion on.
For those that you do know, how you value them is completely up to you. I would ask that you give the most weight to their Cardinals content, but that’s not a requirement. As I said last year, which still holds true, “If you don’t like someone filling your timeline with football and want to dock them a grade, I get that. If you aren’t real fond of someone’s politics and that influences your score, that’s fine. If you want to just downgrade them because they are Brendan Schaeffer, that’s really understandable.”
Also, if there are folks (or yourself, even!) that didn’t make it on the ballot that you want to vote for, at the end of the ballot there is a write in section. You can add up to five accounts (and then rank them as well). Those that are written in will be on the ballot in 2023, assuming I continue doing this.
We’ll keep the voting open until October 21st. I’ll be harassing you on Twitter pretty regularly to vote so don’t worry that need to do it right now or you’ll forget. This year we’ll see if Derrick Goold can join cardinalsgifs in the Twitter Hall of Fame by finishing first for a third time. We’ll see if Katie Woo keeps him from that honor yet again and tie him with two top finishes. We’ll see what kind of ranking surprises are in store. We’ll see if we can get 200 voters this year for the first time. But we won’t see any of that if you don’t vote, so here’s the link.
