It’s time to close the book on the year, but before you get all auld lang on me, the cinephiles among us have some very important unfinished business. In two earlier posts, which you can revisit by following this hyperlink and this one, we unrolled the preliminary lists of nominees for the 2013 Golden GIF Awards. They were preliminary because we were confident that readers would pick up the slack and come up with some outstanding nominees of their own. In this final post, we present those additional nominees — the People’s Choice List — and add them to our final ballot.

Added by People’s Choice to the BEST GIF – MUSICAL OR COMEDY category:

Beer Catch

BEST GIF – DRAMA:

Pop-Up Down

Eephus

BEST DIRECTOR:

Anonymous, Longo 3D

Drew Sheppard, Miggy Covers the Plate

BEST ACTOR – MUSICAL OR COMEDY:

Jose Fernandez

Koji Uehara

BEST ACTOR – DRAMA:

Cliff Lee

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – MUSICAL OR COMEDY:

Jose Fernandez

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – DRAMA:

Hector Gimenez

John Buck

Psycho Jays Fan

BEST ACTRESS / SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Korean Rhythmic Gymnast

BEST BAT FLIP – MUSICAL OR COMEDY:

Choi Jun-Seok’s Foul Ball

BEST BAT FLIP – DRAMA:

Yoenis Cespedes

Please vote below:

We unrolled the preliminary batch of this year’s Golden GIFs nominees on Thursday, but there’s more business to take care of: namely, paying tribute to 2013’s finest moments in bat flippage. Below are the nominees, in two separate categories, for Bat Flip GIF of the Year. As always, additional nominations are welcome via comment.

BEST BAT FLIP – MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Yasiel Puig’s Single

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‘Tis the season for commemorating achievement in filmmaking — and we at NotGraphs never miss a chance to participate in a cultural event (or a chance to hurl a barrage of animated bitmaps at your helpless computers). Therefore, we have decided to jump on board with our very own awards show. For the first annual Golden GIFs Awards, we pored over hundreds of the most sensational, groundbreaking, and critically acclaimed GIFs of 2013, and ultimately divided them into ten categories. Although the initial plan was to produce a list of five nominees for each, we soon realized that there was simply too much outstanding GIFfery this year, and in a few of the categories in particular there was simply no way to reduce the list to five. It will come as no surprise to cinephiles of baseball that David Ortiz and Yasiel Puig head this year’s list, with no fewer than four of each man’s films receiving nods. Prince Fielder is close behind, with three nominations.

We also recognize that, despite our exhaustive search, there are surely a number of worthy GIFs that escaped our attention. Therefore, we are submitting the following as a preliminary list, and for the next week we will be accepting additional awards nominees for consideration in the Comments section. Once these have been considered, a final list will be produced and given back to you, the voters, for a final vote.

Stay tuned also for our companion awards show — where we will choose, in both Drama and Musical or Comedy categories, the Bat Flips of the Year.

BEST GIF – DRAMA

Gomez vs. McCann

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As drear-nighted December sets in, that direful monster, with its sleety whistle; as clouds their storms discharge, upon the airy towers; as the nigh thatch smokes in the sun-thaw, and the burn roars frae bank to brae; ’tis now that the feeble baseball writer stalls and stammers, quailing before his mighty task. Luckily, yours truly is no such writer; he, like the thrifty squirrel, has stored away toothsome morsels of blog-fodder for the lean season; and at just this happy moment, he has recalled where one of them is located.

Namely, it is his oft-postponed duty of introducing a new colleague. Readers, you may struggle to recall a time before Zach Reynolds. Like Jim Leyland or venereal disease, he seems to have always shared our world. That is in part because he announced himself in such a meek and self-effacing manner, with such a lack of trumpetry, as is his wont. And it is in part because he has so penetrated you with his intellect, titillated you with his wit, and indeed, blinded you with his science.

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TROY — As another rosy-fingered dawn broke over the walled city on Tuesday, the Aegean League’s winter meetings suddenly ramped up the intrigue, with new rumors swirling over a potential “trade of the century” involving the league’s two biggest sluggers. Hector and Achilles are both coming off career years, with the former having rewritten the record books by personally slaughtering 31,000 Greek warriors, while his counterpart achieved the unprecedented feat of challenging and defeating the river-god Skamandros. The two men have spent the last four seasons trading off the league’s MVP award, and are widely expected to finish one-two in this year’s voting yet again.

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Friends, I have seen the future, and the future is now. It comes with hyperlinks, tab-delimited tables, and bulleted lists. It comes in typefaces with dignified names, like Times New Roman and Courier New. It comes fast and it changes on a dime, provided you click reload often. It’s called the World Wide Web, and it will forever explode your notions of possibility.

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Prince Fielder doesn’t call the wrong number. You answer the wrong phone.

Well, the Hall of Fame’s class of 2013 has been revealed, and I can’t pretend to be thrilled about it. No, I’m not talking about the Baseball Hall of Fame; it’s November, and baseball is dead to me. I’m talking of course about the National Toy Hall of Fame, which, for the woefully ignorant among you, is based in the Strong Museum of Play (that’s its name) in Rochester, New York. Faced with a solid pool of nominees, the voters once again displayed a truly breathtaking lack of boldness, imagination, and critical thinking, electing only two mediocre candidates — Chess and Rubber Duck — and thus ushering the Hall further down the road to complete irrelevancy.

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It’s high time someone spoke up about a potentially dangerous trend in Major League Baseball. The league has been pushing its luck for years in assembling awards candidates at season’s end. Driven (I can only assume) by some kind of twisted sensationalism, it has been arranging players not only in closer and closer proximity for photoshoots, but forcing them into more and more active and realistic positions, and thereby greatly increasing the chance of accidental injury. Don’t get me wrong: we all love looking at these pictures. But someone, at some point, is going to get hurt. And we cannot allow that to happen.

These shoots have been going on for as long as we can remember, but the basic safety controls have been gradually eroded for years now. While players were traditionally photographed in casual, head-on poses:

…these poses were abandoned in favor of “action shots” like the following — though each player was still confined to a separate small room, with fairly thick walls.

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The 18,172 proud gentlemen who have donned a Major League uniform, plus Boileryard Clarke, can be said to be the finest baseball athletes the world has ever offered. But of course such a statement requires an untenable simplification. It ignores Josh Gibson, for instance, and Sadaharu Oh, and it includes Yuniesky Betancourt. Not only that, but it discounts a great many gifted athletes who, for various circumstantial reasons, were never given the opportunity to excel in this particular sport. One can safely assume that Jesse Owens would have stolen more than a few bags, and that Mikhail Baryshnikov would have made one hell of a shortstop. One once said similar things about Michael Jordan, but one bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch, now does it? And why stop there, really? Why not speculate about the baseball IQ of the Duke of Wellington, or the scrappiness of Spartacus, or the mound presence of Moses?

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