Baseball Follies

   Being a huge baseball nerd I generally make a stop over at Sports Illustrated to see what's up with the national pastime. This time of year most baseball writers are busy compiling their lists for who deserves to win the various awards; building their case for why one player deserves the MVP or the Cy Young over the other candidates. SI's Tom Verducci recently published his list and in it he made of the more pernicious arguments that frankly never made any sense to me. See if you can spot it:

    Verducci selects Toronto-born Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds for the NL MVP stating "Votto wins easily because he was the best player on any of the NL playoff teams." Later on he chooses Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners to win the AL Cy Young, arguing that "Hernandez will win this award fairly comfortably...He was exactly what it says on the award: the most outstanding pitcher in the league. Just ask any hitter."

     Did you spot it? The MVP is dependent on how the player's team performed overall, whereas the CY Young isn't. Perhaps I should mention that Hernandez' Mariners finished with the worst record in the American League 61-101 (.377 winning percentage). This has never made much sense to me - why  is the one award, for all intents and purposes, limited to those players who happen to play on a winning team while the other is open to all teams? Only twice in recent history has the MVP gone to a player from a losing team: Andre Dawson of the Chicago Cubs in 1987 and Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers in 2003. Pitchers from losing teams win all the time, in 2008 Cleveland's Cliff Lee won, and they finished 8th in the American League - 7.5 games out of the wild card.

    In practical terms what happens every year is the baseball writers (those who vote for the major awards) basically take a look at the 4 playoff bound teams in each league and pick the best player of that lot. And I can't, for the life of me, figure out why. The impact one positional player has on a team's record frankly isn't that much - the image of the Herculean slugger metaphorically lifting the entire team on his back and willing them into the promised land just isn't very accurate. And yet, every year we're subjected to the same process of selection.

     It's one of the reasons why Toronto's Jose Bautista likely won't receive a single 1st place vote - Toronto simply wasn't competitive enough. If he played for Tampa Bay or Minnesota, his obvious short-comings would be rationalized away and he'd be a likely favourite to win the MVP. I'm not suggesting that Bautista is the legitimate MVP, he isn't. I'm only saying that he wouldn't have been dismissed quite so readily if he played on a winning team.

     Everything else about this sport is scientifically analyzed to the minutest detail, that the most prestigious award in the sport isn't, is not only confusing, it's absurd.


p.s. Go Doc Halladay!