2016 JPEG of the Year Tournament

There is something biblical about the whole slate of JPEGs I drew up this year, something divinely inspired, providential. I guess it’s that if you put them all together in a book, it would be like the bible because the bible is a book, too. So I guess in that sense, I am kinda like God. But I’m probably shorter, I bet.

I suppose most everybody is happy and relieved that 2016 is almost over. There sure seems to be much, much more apocalyptic angst in the zeitgeist now, even more so than at the end of 1999 when everyone was worried that all of our computers would stop working because of bad internet. Remember Y2K? So pathetically naive we were.

But enough of all that. Every single Year in Review kinda thing you will see on the internet will be bedazzled with so much hand-wringing and doom-saying. So I’m not really going to do any more of that here, unless I think there is a decent joke in it.

Boy oh boy, This Week in JPEGs really had a year, didn’t it? 20 of the 26 weeks of the season featured something or other for y’all to peep at, and I’m pretty proud of that. Honestly, I’m shocked that this stupid and limiting medium I have imposed on myself has been as fertile as it has. I keep thinking I need to come up with a new feature but I’ll inevitably get two or three JPEGable ideas a week. So I guess I’ll keep doing it as long as it works (relatively speaking, of course).

So here’s how this is gonna work: I have bracketed 22 of this year’s JPEGs into a single-elimination tournament (the 19 weekly winners and the three from the other week when we had a three-way tie). We’ll bop through the match-ups and you all will get to vote the winner of each head-to-head. In the end, we’ll get the JPEG o’ the Year. Last time we did this, if you can remember way back to 2013, your favorite for the whole season was Joey Votto is Batman. I like how that message is still relevant today, maybe even moreso than when I drew it up.

So beginning next week, we’ll start this whole thing up and see what happens. If nothing else, it’ll be something. Which is far more than what the Reds are doing this winter, which is nothing.