One and a Half Technicals

Now I’ve had a few days to digest the list of MLB award winners for the season just gone, there’s something I’ve got to get off my chest. Firstly, I would never say that any of the MVP or Cy Young award winners didn’t deserve to win… every year there are multiple excellent performances from hitters and pitchers alike, and there are several people in both the AL and NL who would make worthy winners of each award. The difference between them can be measured in fractions. Magglio Ordonez deserved to win the AL MVP… but A-Rod deserved it more. I thought Matt Holliday would be the NL MVP, but Jimmy Rollins is certainly well deserving of the honour and I have no quibbles with his credentials for holding the title. But if the voting for the awards had been done properly, the NL MVP WOULD have headed to Colorado instead of the east coast. 

The ballots for MVP and Cy Young awards are cast at the end of SEPTEMBER, when the regular season schedule concludes. Yet there are more games still to come in October; and not just any old games either, but the most important games of the season for the 8 teams still in action. Isn’t this sort of high-pressure, last chance saloon situation where a player’s real value to his team is tested, where the greats shine brighter than the rest – on the days where if you fail to perform today, there will be no game tomorrow? So why is October action not taken into account in awards voting? 

Let’s forget Holliday and Rollins for now and look instead at the AL Cy Young race. It was a very tight one all the way through the season, but by the end of September there were really only two plausible winners – C.C. Sabathia and Josh Beckett (no disrespect to Messrs. Wang and Lackey). It was so tight you may as well have tossed a coin for it (and I suspect some members of the voting panel did). I confess that I personally was leaning towards C.C. at that point, so I will forgive the voters for ultimately giving him the award. But by the end of October, there could be no doubt in any baseball fan’s mind which of the two they would rather have on the mound this year when the glare of the lights is at its brightest and the camera’s scrutiny is keenest.

Sabathia’s October saw him issuing walks like he was handing out flyers on a street corner, lasting barely 5 innings per start at a horrible ERA. It looked like he was auditioning for the lead role in Kei Igawa’s life story.

Beckett in contrast won all 4 of his starts, throwing 30 innings at a cost of only 4 runs total, with only 2 walks.

By the end of October, the neck-and-neck race, the coin toss, had been decisively settled in Beckett’s favour in the mind of most fans - but inexplicably voting had already taken place and someone else is now wearing his crown. And if voting had been held at the end of October, Matt Holliday’s impressive post-season at the helm of the Rockies charge to the World Series (incidentally, sweeping past Jimmy Rollins’ Phillies en route) would have seen him edge Rollins by a nose for the NL MVP title. I guarantee it.  

So why does the voting system continue to treat the games that matter the most of all as if they don’t matter one bit? Why, when the eyes of the entire baseball world are watching, have the eyes of the voting panel already been sealed? I have heard some say that it would be unfair to players of the 22 other teams whose season ended on September 30^th. That’s just nonsense. All those teams had the opportunity to reach the postseason when the season began in April, had they performed well enough. If their players had given enough ‘value’, they would be playing in October. Really, if a club fails to reach the play-offs, how much ‘value’ can any of the players truly be said to have added? You are either IN the play-offs, or OUT of them. Missing out by ½ a game or by 30 games adds up to the same thing – you’re OUT. There’s no prize for getting close. So this whole notion that we should be penalising the players who got their clubs into postseason action by ignoring their excellent performances under awesome levels of pressure, just to “be fair” to those who didn’t play well enough to reach the October limelight, just doesn’t wash with me.

Sort it out Bud. Because if every game isn’t taken into account in the judging, then the awards can never really wind up having the meaning and prestige that they should.

 - Dan T