The shape
Three steps, and no step does another's job
Almost every misreading of an awards page is a reader assuming the grade decided something it did not.
1
Eligibility
who can be on the shortlist
Rules a commissioner sets. Nothing on the grading side can put a name on this list or keep one off it.
2
Grading
what order the shortlist is in
A weighted sum that ranks the candidates. It is a reading aid — including the optional qualifying cut line, which marks a candidate and never gates one.
3
The vote
who actually wins
The league's, not the engine's. A shortlist is a proposal; the ballot is the decision, and the two are allowed to disagree.
The two awards
One for a player, one for a manager
For a player
League MVP
- Shortlist
- 2–12 names
- Voters
- members, commissioners, appointed
Your commissioner names it, sizes the shortlist and hands the vote to one of those three. A league that picks appointed holds no vote at all — the shortlist is still published, and the pick is a decision somebody made rather than an election nobody turned up to.
For a manager
Manager of the Year
- Shortlist
- 2–8 names
- Voters
- members, commissioners, appointed
Your commissioner names it, sizes the shortlist and hands the vote to one of those three. A league that picks appointed holds no vote at all — the shortlist is still published, and the pick is a decision somebody made rather than an election nobody turned up to.
A shortlist is a cap rather than a target, and that is the point of the feature: a ballot with every starter on it is a leaderboard, and a league does not need one of those. On the shipped defaults the MVP proposes 5 names and Manager of the Year 4.
The scale
A perfect score is not 100
The most reliably misread number in the product, and the reason is structural rather than arbitrary.
A perfect score is
whatever your league's weights add up to
A grade is a weighted sum, so a perfect score is whatever this league's weights add up to — a fact about your league, not about the app. On the shipped defaults that is 40.0 for Manager of the Year and 23.0 for the MVP, and it changes the moment a slider moves.
And some lines cannot win
A line can carry a weight and still be unwinnable — honors in a league that arms none, the postseason lines in a league that plays none. Those do not count toward the ceiling, because a ceiling nobody can reach is not a ceiling.
Each line is worth up to 10, in steps of 0.5, and a commissioner decides what matters. That is why the ceiling is read off the shortlist's own columns rather than summed from the settings — a line nobody can score is not part of what was available.
The badge
Why a percentage never travels alone
Compressed at the bottom
The manager award's curved lines pay a floor rather than a zero, so a manager who finished last still clears about six percent and nobody ever reads near zero.
And at the top
Several lines are winner-take-all — one manager takes the whole playoff line, one takes the title bonus, one leads the wire — so a hundred is not a grade anybody has ever scored or reasonably could.
So it never travels alone
The percentage says how close to everything available a season was; the rank says how that compared to the eleven other people playing the same season. The badge renders both or neither.
The ballot
Nobody sees who you voted for
Each of these is enforced somewhere rather than merely intended — the first by the shape of the data itself.
Nobody is shown who voted for whom. Not even your commissioner.
The roster a ballot screen is built from carries a name and whether they have voted, and has no field for the pick — so there is no screen that could leak one, however it was built.
Who has not voted is shown, and that is a different fact.
Turnout is a fact about the league; a ballot is not. A commissioner chasing the last three votes needs the first and is never given the second.
The export carries the tally and never the ballots.
A vote count per candidate and the turnout per race are exported in full — enough to rebuild the result and the margin. The per-member rows are the one thing the archive deliberately refuses to hand over.
A name cannot be removed from a race once voting has started.
Otherwise the people who voted first voted on a different race than the people who voted last, and no amount of recounting fixes that.
Awards questions
What a league asks before it votes
Join the waitlist
An honor with a real vote behind it
A shortlist off your own league's numbers, a secret ballot, and a result nobody has to take on trust.
Free while in beta · invite-based signup · we'll send yours.