Cast your ballot in the 2022 Pitching Grade Challenge!

Update: Balloting for the Pitching Grade Challenge has now closed. Stay tuned for results!

Hey APBA Fans!

The 2022 Major League Baseball regular season is over. Now that it is over, The APBA Blog is excited to announce the 2022 APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge! It’s hard to believe that this is the FIFTH year of the Challenge.

What is the APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge?

Quite simply, the Pitching Grade Challenge is your chance to enter a contest and see how good you are at guessing what grade APBA will give the pitchers this year.

I have chosen twenty starting pitchers from 2022 and you will vote on what letter grade each one will receive on their upcoming 2022 APBA card. We will all find out the grades when the APBA GO set comes out in late November.

Pitching Grade Challenge history

This is the fifth Pitching Grade Challenge in as many years. Each year, the involvement by APBA fans has increased.

In the initial year in 2018, 121 readers participated, Jesse Elicker was the clear winner, guessing 19 of the 20 pitchers. You can see the results here. In 2019, it was a tight race. Two APBA fans, Joe Deauseault and Darren Schulz were correct on 19 of 20 while nine more got 18 right.

In 2020, we had 141 entrants and of those, Gordon Titchener won by correctly guessing all 20 pitchers. He was the first in the first entrant to score a perfect 100% score. Gordon had set a high bar for future years!

Last year was a record-breaking year for the Challenge as we had 242 APBA fans visiting the ballot box.  Of those, three guessed 19 of 20 correctly.  The 2021 winners were Mark Fitzkee, Shawn Robuccio, Nick Tegeler.  

So, let’s move on to this year’s APBA Blog 2022 Pitching Grade Challenge…

Here’s how the Pitching Grade Challenge works

As in past Challenges, I have chosen 20 starting pitchers from this season. Via a web form, you will be able to guess which basic grade (A, B, C or D) each pitcher will receive in the upcoming set which will soon be released from the Company. 

Here are some rules and clarifications:

1. The Challenge is scheduled to end on November 22nd at 11:59pm.
2. One entry per person, please.
3. I am only looking for the letter grade for each pitcher and not strikeout or control ratings.
4. If a pitcher receives a grade as a starter and reliever (split grade) or is graded strictly as a reliever, that pitcher will be dropped from the contest results.    
5. If a pitcher receives an A&C or an A&B grade, he will be considered an A for the sake of this Challenge. 
6. If there is a tie for the most correct guesses, there will be a randomized tie-breaking method if needed. 
7. While I will eventually post an analysis of the aggregate data, I will not publicly post your guesses without your permission. Your email address remains private and is only used to contact you in case you are the winner.
8. Employees of the APBA Games Company are ineligible (for obvious reasons). While I am not officially entering the contest, I will be making my own guesses for fun. I’ll post my ballot publicly once the deadline has passed.

Grand Prize!

The person who has the most correct guesses will receive a free prize from the APBA Game Company. Many thanks to John Herson and the APBA Company for donating the Grand Prize for the winner. This has always been a fun event in the fall and I appreciate this contribution by the Company!

Thanks also to those responsible for the APBA Journal Pitching Grade Contest in the past. It was an inspiration for this effort.

Final thoughts

Like last year, when you receive the email notification of the successful submission, you will also receive your ballot in that email for future reference. If you don’t see the email, check your spam filter. Keep in mind that I also do not know the grades of the pitchers and cannot tell you what your score is.

Feel free to leave me a comment.  Like past years, I have added a text field in the ballot. If anyone has suggestions to improve the Challenge (or The APBA Blog itself) please feel free to let me know. Or just take the time to say “hi!”.

Don’t wait! Click the green button below to enter the 2022 APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge! Good luck to everyone!!