The precursor to the @QBConvention

 

Folks have wondered where the idea for the Queens Baseball Convention came from. Well, it was birthed by the Mets Police Awards aka The Mazzys. The idea of the "Live Awards" came to me and my cousin Shannon Shark on a whim and as usual at the time, the tech and producing and getting the actual Mazzy Awards in time for the show fell on me. Shannon did the writing and creative producing for the show while I was the producer and director. Darren of the7line hopped on board with his marketing genius and we all pushed the idea into reality.

The Mets Police Awards. from TheMediaGoon.com on Vimeo.

I am stealing this whole post from Metspolice.com

Mets Police Awards recap, video, pictures and winners

On Saturday night we held the first live-ceremony of the Mets Police Awards where several Mets fans gathered and we actually handed out Mazzys.

The event was beyond what we hoped. Media Goon and I (with some poking from Darren at The 7 Line) had been kicking this around for like two months and couldn’t quite decide when, where or what to do. So last weekend we decided just to jump in the pool and see what happened.

We called out a bar (Donovan’s at Woodside) and a time and hoped for the best.

Goon and I have spent many many hours at Donovan’s and on the way over I even wondered aloud about worst case scenario. Then we walked in and Donovan’s was PACKED like I have never seen in 20+ years of Donovansing. Seems there was a wedding across the street and the young folks came for a beverage,

Anyway, we did have a room in the back and a sizeable crowd showed up for Awards. (Click on it for a bigger view)

The crowd at the 2012 Mets Police Awards

The winners are….

Mets Player of the Year: R.A. Dickey. Sadly R.A. could not attend but @zofourtwenty nailed the acceptance speech by thanking Modell’s.

The Gunslinger of the Year….Mark Healey. This was a fun one to give out and captured the spirit of the night. Many of us have ridiculous twitter arguments, twitter wars, twitter banter…but it’s just passionate Mets fans having a discussion. Mark and I probably go at it 3x a week but it was good to hang.

 

 

Mark later got up and accepted the Award for Mets Executive Of The Year on behalf of Shannon Forde. I did email Shannon to tell her she won and she seems happy and honored. We’ll get her Mazzy to her at a game.

 

 

 

Another fun award is the Have You Read My Post Award which honestly exists for only one reason. So we can, um, honor, Ed Marcus from The Real Dirty for his, um, aggressive twitter marketing of his posts. Here he is accepting his Mazzy.

Another one that was great to give out was Fan Of The Year which went to Darren of The7Line. The guy nailed the zeitgeist this year from the Carter 8 shirts which were adopted by the players, Hi57ory, all things Dickey and the cool event at the last game of the year. Totally in-sync with the fanbase’s emotional core. Great job, with some solid fundraising along the way. There was also a very special consideration for this award which wasn’t even mentioned in the nominations but I will get to that below.

 

 

The Man Up And Play Better Award goes to the player who steps up his game. R.A. Dickey with the second win of the night.

 

 

Next up was Best Writer. 

A little history on The Awards. This started as some December Filler a few years back where I just typed up some awards and filled a post and got a little attention. This year Darren and Media Goon suggested we turn it into an event.

As we started mapping it around we talked about not going for the obvious, and in one of the earlier drafts we considered giving this one to Randy from The Apple because he really nails his craft. But then I couldn’t imagine any scenario where Greg Prince didn’t win. He’s just better.

In the post-ceremony hang Randy told me that when he heard he was nominated he actually had the “oh no” feeling and was going to decline if Greg didn’t win. Well here’s your three time Best Writer…Greg Prince!

MetsPolice Best Writer award winner Greg Prince

Continuing our fun, there has been an in-joke among bloggers that Kerel Cooper is the Best Looking. Well it’s not really a joke, he probably is, but we like to just keep telling him that for fun banter in that male-schoolyard kind of way. I’ve been schticking it up most of the year that I might find Kelly Lake better looking than Kerel and hinted that she might win.

What we wanted to do was see the look on Kerel’s face when we went in a totally different direction, but unfortunately Kerel couldn’t make it (with very good reason.) We talked about giving him the award anyway and then decided nah…the Best Looking is Randy Medina from readtheapple.com who started the whole Kerel schtick in the first place.

MetsPolice Best Looking Award winner Randy Medina readtheapple.com

 

Our final in-ceremony award was to the Most Powerful Person In The Blogosphere. This one was decided by a vote on the website and the winner was Matt Cerrone of MetsBlog. 

There are a few other categories that we scrubbed from the live ceremony because we thought they would just drag down the night, but I do want to award them.

A very special Mazzy to Greg Prince for his work on the Hofstra 50th Anniversary Conference, which was one of the highlights of the year. I guess we could create a “best event” category next year and throw in things like the Dickey Outing or even these silly awards. Greg could have won Fan of The Year for finishing what Dana started…but let’s honor Greg separately here for his great work.

Blog Of The Year annually goes to a newer blogger. I like to give this to a blog that popped on the radar so that we can turn more people on to the newer sites rather than just picking say MetsBlog which of course is great but doesn’t need the promotion in this case. The Blog of The Year goes to MetsBro.com who had more Uniform Scoops than anyone and was dead accurate every time.

Jersey of the Year goes to $20’s at Modell’s road blue Dickey 2013 jerseys! Home pins could have won but the $20 sale had many many of us jump in our cars on a snowy Friday before Christmas to go back some jerseys.

Slogan of the Year is something that catches in my mind making me type it incessantly. While it didn’t work out, Faith Will Be Rewardedgot us through half the summer at least.

The Blog Post of The Year is the post that got the most traffic. Thanks to incoming links from both MetsBlog and UniWatch…the Mets Uniform Rumor Roundup proves that folks are at least semi-interested in the ongoing uniform discussions.

Banner of the Year. So many good choices but y’all know I loves my Mettle the Mule.

Best Donut….Maple Frosted.

I think we have a nice template here for a cool event next January. The date seems to work…so we can pick that earlier (oh lets say first Saturday in January again)…promote it further out…do more with the nominations…if we do it 1-4-14 it’s a great time to honor Gil Hodges and LETS TRY TO CONVINCE BURKHARDT TO EMCEE IT!!!

 

Thanks to everyone who participated, came, promoted and organized. LGM!

Want to see what we have been up to since then? Go to our YouTube page subscribe, like, share, and turn on your notifications.  Why am I doing all that? Because we are doing QBC 2021 virtually on Feb 6 2021 and you can watch it for free on YouTube.  Panels you ask? Why yes we have panels. State of the Mets, SNY's Baseball Night in NY, UniPanel: Return of Black Jerseys: Yay or Nay, Joe McEwing player panel and maybe one or two more. Let's Hang... Click here for the QBC YouTube Page.