Cast your ballot in the Pitching Grade Challenge 7!

Balloting for the Pitching Grade Challenge 7 is now closed. Thanks to everyone who voted!

Lucky 7!

The 2024 Major League Baseball season is in the midst of the postseason and once again, The APBA Blog is excited to announce the APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge! This time around, it’s the Pitching Grade Challenge 7!

What is the APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge?

For those new to The Pitching Grade Challenge, here is a recap.

The Challenge is your chance to enter an online contest and see how good you are at guessing what grade APBA will give certain pitchers this year.

I have chosen twenty MLB starting pitchers from 2024 and you will vote on what letter grade each one will receive on their upcoming 2024 APBA card. We will all find out the grades when the APBA GO set comes out sometime around late November.

Pitching Grade Challenge history

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

In the first 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!

In 2021, it 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.  

There were two perfect winners last year. Bernard Servais and Craig Robinson scored 20 out of 20. James Morgan deserves an honorable mention as well. Finally, Tom Doran also was a perfect 20 in last year’s Challenge.

So, let’s move on to this year’s APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge 7!

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 24, 2024 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 a 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 grand prize winner of the APBA Blog Pitching Grade Challenge 7 will receive a free prize from the APBA Game Company.

A special thank you to John Herson and the APBA Company for their generous donations all of these years. This fun fall event has been a tradition for many years, and I am grateful for their continued support.

Final thoughts

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 do not know the grades of the pitchers ahead of time and cannot tell you what your score is when you vote.

Feel free to leave me a comment along with your ballot.  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!”.

Good luck to everyone!!