Vote for me as your MLB Fan of the Year!

TL;DR: If you have a Twitter account, tweet the hashtag #AsFOTY2 as many times as humanly possible before this Monday, September 19th to bring me victory!

It started with a very random email last month from my buddy at the A’s front office. A snippet of the message:

This is a little out of left field, but you have been selected as a nominee for the inaugural MLB Fans of the Year program. You are one of four A’s fans at this late stage… The process for nominating winners, which will be described on MLB.com and athletics.com, will take place via voting on Twitter.

In order to feature you, we will need…a video on why you should be picked as an MLB Fan of the Year. We can shoot the video at any game this week, or you can film on your own.

I couldn’t find a babysitter so I couldn’t make it to the weeknight games. My only option was to film it independently.

I initially thought I could do it on my own with just my laptop’s camera, but decided against it. Instead, I reached out to my cousin & professional video guy Daniel. He’s a product photographer during the week & a wedding photographer/videographer on the weekends.

I reached out to him asking him for a favor & not to spend too much effort helping me out with this. He was excited to do this. The next morning — the day of the shoot, he sends me this cameraphone pic:

His car’s trunk full of video gear. I knew I asked the right guy for the job.

I thought it would be a cool effect if I had my signs displayed as a background for the video. My living room’s wall is bare becaise it’s in the middle of a remodel, a perfect canvas for my printed signs to be mounted as a mosaic.

It was all coming nicely together. The night before, I stayed up to write up a script. I shared it with my wife who edited it down further. I did a run-through & timed it past the three-minute mark! Further edits were required.

I’m horrible in front of the camera & took much too long to record this seemingly simple one-minute video. My cousin put me at ease saying that we can record in chunks & he would splice them together in post-production. I’m not a natural so it still took all evening. I managed to stumble through.

In just a few hours, he had the first draft of the video. Here it is in its entirety:

The competition officially went live on Tuesday, September 13th. They even created a nifty landing page for me & my fellow finalists, & the Athletics even wrote a complementary post on the team’s blog. Even though we’ve gone through many rounds of editing, the MLB team cut it down even further so it’s below the one minute mark.

Voting is done through a hashtag campaign, in which they’ll do a final count of the hashtags at the end of the competition. Here are the details:

• I’m assigned the hashtag #AsFOTY2.
• Each tweet should only contain the above hashtag.
• Voting can’t be automated, so don’t utilize any bots!
• One Twitter account can vote multiple times, so vote away!
• Original posts only; retweets won’t count.
• Best bet: Vote through the MLB.com/awards site.

So, if you can spare a moment & have a Twitter account — or can spare many moments to create a new Twitter account — come join the fun & vote for me to help me accomplish my goal! Thanks!

Come check out the rest of my work! I’m constantly adding new signs!