Emoji the vote! MLB and Twitter are letting fans vote for All-Stars with emojis
Forget Shark Week, in pro sports this has been emoji week. Between the World Cup and the NBA emoji war, there’s already been a strong showing. But now MLB is giving emojis actual power.
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MLB and Twitter have teamed up to create emojis of the nine players in the Final Vote run-off, which will determine the final spot on each All-Star team. The Final Vote finishes in a flurry on Friday, with six hours of Twitter voting, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. ET. Like last year each use of a player’s specified hashtag counts as an All-Star game vote. New this year: Each use of that hashtag will also trigger a special emoji of said player.
So in short: This time emojis count.
Last year, the Twitter portion of the Final Vote produced about 4,200 per minute, and that only figures to increase with this emoji boost. The mechanism used here is similar to what Twitter did during the NBA Finals and World Cup, when fans could tweet a hashtag and a team logo, trophy or country flag would appear.
The MLB players featured are: Xander Bogaerts of the Boston Red Sox, Brian Dozier of the Minnesota Twins, Mike Moustakas of the Kansas City Royals, Yoenis Cespedes of the Detroit Tigers, then Johnny Cueto of the Cincinnati Reds, Jeurys Familia of the New York Mets, Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Carlos Martinez of the St. Louis Cardinals and Troy Tulowitzki of the Colorado Rockies.
As of Friday’s tally, Martinez had taken a small lead over Cueto in the NL and Moustakas was leading in the AL. On the emoji leaderboard, however, Cueto and Moustakas are the best. Just look at them!
Both MLB and Twitter are expecting big things (and some fun) out of the Final Vote emojis.
“As emojis have become a regular part of text communications,” says Andrew Patterson, MLB Advanced Media’s senior director of new media, “it’s great to partner with Twitter to find creative means of extending and contextualizing those exciting last hours of the Final Vote experience for baseball fans on Twitter.”
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“We applaud MLB for allowing fans around the world to vote on Twitter in real time,” says Danny Keens, the head of North American sports at Twitter. “Today, fans can have their voice heard only on Twitter via hashtags that trigger emojis, a great way to add fun and color to Tweets.”
We can only hope this does well enough that MLB and Twitter bring us a Bryce Harper emoji soon.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
