Thinking Baseball Awards.....

Thanksgiving is around the corner and you know what that means? Yep, it means baseball awards are being handed out. Between the time a World Series champion is crowned and the frenzy of the free agent / trading season is when baseball takes a breathe and hands out the hardware to the most deserving players from the prior year.

When growing up, I was always excited about these awards. I would make out my own ballots, and see where they compared to the baseball writers who actually voted for the awards. I had a hard time coming up with ten players for my MVP Ballot, but usually my top five were pretty close to the experts, as well as my Cy Young and Rookie of the Year "votes". I thank The Sporting News for reprinting all the boxscores each week for me to waste my summer nights reading (yes, we read boxscores a week late back then), and early ESPN so I could see highlights of all players to go with my boxscore reading.

For me, Cy Young "voting" was easy. My choice each year was the pitcher you just didn't want to face that year. You knew who the best pitcher was on a look/feel test. There may have been a few good nominees in some years, but it was usually just a matter of seeing who had the better numbers that helped determine my choice.

For me, the MVP was different. It could be a batter or pitcher, but the important distinction between it and the Cy Young was, the Cy went to the best pitcher, while the MVP was supposed to go to the most "valuable" player. Who was that player who helped that team win or be a contender that year, and they just couldn't live without?

I thought about what a privilege it must be to fill out one of those ballots (Remember, young and still obliviously naive.). How the writers must have really poured over their notes in submitting their voting sheets. Then those thoughts started to change for me in 1987 with the awarding of the NL MVP to Andre Dawson. While Dawson had a great season with his 49 home runs and 137 RBIs, Jack Clark was my choice with 35 and 106, plus Clark had 104 more walks and an OPS 159 points better than Dawson. But to me the biggest clincher was the fact that Dawson's Cubs finished 18 1/2 games behind Clark's Cardinals for the NL East divisional crown. Plus the Cubs were 11 games under .500 for the year. What was Dawson's value to that finish?

Then they did it again in 2003, when the AL MVP went to Alex Rodriguez with his good statistical year, while Carlos Delgado (with stats equal to, and maybe better then Rodriguez), and Jorge Posada ended up behind him in the voting, even though their teams won 15 and 30 games more then Rodriguez's Texas Rangers who finished 71-91, and 25 games out of first place.

What were the writers thinking? Or were they? While those may have been from lack of thinking, and just using numbers to place the players in the voting, we know seem to have gone the opposite way in some cases with over thinking. Case in point is Keith Law's 2nd place vote for Javier Vazquez in the 2009 Cy Young voting, while leaving Chris Carpenter off his ballot. Part of Law's reasoning behind his vote was the defense behind each pitcher, and the fact that because Vazquez pitched in the NL East, he faced better lineups more often. The fact that Carpenter had 2 more wins, and six less losses, seemed to be ignored by Law, and in fact he states that wins does not go into his thought process for the award. While I agree with Law about Carpenter's lack of pitching 200 innings (though he did get in 192.1), he was close enough for me to consider it a non-factor. For me, it all comes back to the look/feel test I spoke of earlier. Who did you not want to see on the mound against your favorite team. I remember lots of talk about the Cardinals top two pitchers during the summer, but not much about Vazquez and his 10 losses making the Braves dangerous.

I'm not picking on Mr. Law, and have enjoyed reading his work and listening to him on ESPN Radio. Matter of fact, I probably have more problem with the vote and reasoning behind Dan Haren's third place vote from Will Carroll. Haren had a nice year, especially the first half, and was in my top five for NL pitchers, but his 3.14 ERA and 27 home runs allowed was not Top 3 material when looked at the other involved.  Law's placing of Vazquez second, sticks out to me more, because it is in fact a second place vote. While it may seem trivial, I am probably not as bothered if Vazquez is third on his ballot. It is still puzzling, but a little less so.

I'm just getting a feeling that either not enough care is being taken by some writers when they vote on these awards, or there is too much over thinking and "smart" voting going on when compiling their ballots. Baseball is a simple and beautiful game. Look and feel. You'll get it right.


***** As I'm wrapping up this column, the 2009 AL MVP voting has just been announced. Joe Mauer won in a landslide, like everyone thought he would, but he did not win it unanimously. One voter decided that Miguel Cabrera was the AL MVP. Guess that night of drinking and subsequent arrest during the final weekend of the season was a part of that "valuable" quality. Really? Ugh!