(This article will also include my awards for the American League and National League).
To an extent, I believe in sabermetrics. I don’t tout ERA and batting average with RISP as individual statistics, but as team statistics, even if an individual player must come through when it counts. Both are still important to have, but neither are a good way to evaluate an individual player.
Last year, I argued that Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners should be the American League Cy Young winner. This year however, I don’t think so.
It appears that baseball fans in recent years have caught a bad case of Sadecki-itis.
I don’t care about how good Hernandez’s ERA is or how many strikeouts he threw: Awarding the top honor for pitching to someone that went 13-12 for a team that won 62 games is exactly why people are losing interest in pro baseball.
To put it simply, it’s abhorrent.
In 2009, Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals and Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants both won the honors for Cy Young. Greinke finished 16-8, while Lincecum finished 15-7. At least, in the case of Greinke, he had dominated early that season, while the Giants had a respectable record of 88 wins.
The Mariners, plain and simply, have stunk. Strikeouts are boring, because people want to see wins. To some extent, how hard is it to be the best player on a team that no one takes seriously?
And here’s the irony of eye-popping stats: The New York Yankees have performed better as a whole when Alex Rodriguez has been at his relative worst.
Awarding league honors to the best players from bad teams, like I said, is exactly why fans have generally stopped caring about pro baseball. You may think it’s in the interest of fairness to award the hard-luck guys, but at the same time, the league needs viable stars in order to generate revenue.
It is what it is.
I’m an A’s fan, and they have plenty of hard luck players. But even I know that the league wouldn’t be in business without New York, Chicago, and Boston, not by shear size of those markets but by consumer willingness to spend money.
So get over it.
These days as well, I would submit to you that there’s no such thing as a hard-luck pro baseball player, when even mediocre talent can make upwards of a million dollars per year.
To me, it’s the same as describing a 6’2”, 295 lb NFL lineman as “smallish.”
Now that I have made my spiel, here are my AL and NL awards.