Reasonable selections for each award handed out by the BBWAA, which is rare. Although there's obviously still a long way to go, as both second place MVP finishers were far from deserving. Pedroia was in the top four on 27 of 28 ballots, but left off the other ballot entirely. That last ballot was apparently Evan Grant's, which is odd, since he had Pedroia 4th on September 20th. So he either made a mistake on his official ballot, or had a sudden change of heart.
I'm assuming the Bartlett 5th place vote was by one of the people responsible for naming him Rays MVP. That vote, combined with the nonsense last year with the two Detroit writers voting for Magglio, got me thinking--why don't they institute a rule that you can't vote for a guy on your hometown team? You could still call a guy a "unanimous" selection if he got 26 first place votes (or 30 in the NL), and was left off the ballots of his city's writers, which he was ineligible for. It actually would increase the number of unanimous selections, as A-Rod would have received that distinction last year. It just seems obvious that some of the voters are incapable of objectively evaluating players on the team they cover.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Pedroia Wins AL MVP
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7 comments:
Looks like it was the latter for Evan Grant.
"Obviously, I was wrong in my opinion in this situation," Grant told the Globe's Tony Massarotti. "This year, I think I may have tended to value power numbers over the intangibles. I may have focused too much on the statistical analysis. As I continued to weigh that, Dustin dropped further and further on my list, but I think what was proven today was that I was wrong."
This is how "statistical analysis" gets a bad rap. Freakin' idiot.
Only 1 1st place vote for K-Rod? Don't the voters know he had 62 saves?
Jacob, I like your idea about not letting BBWAA members vote for players from the teams they cover, but I don't think it would work. The problem, I think, is that there isn't the same number of writers covering each team. For example, there might be only five BBWAA members who cover the Tigers, while there are nine who cover the Yankees. And because of that, there would be four more voters who were eligible to vote for Tigers players than there are voters eligible for Yankees players. Does that make sense?
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that for the awards voting there are two writers from each city that has a team in that league. That's why there are 32 voters for the NL awards but just 28 for the AL.
Jacob you're right. 2 writers from each city that has a team vote and it rotates annually amongst the writers. Plus these voters can only vote on one award (ROY, CY, MVP) per year.
You might be right about that. The BBWAA constitution is quite wordy and confusing. I based my last comment on this item from the constitution:
[T]he sports editor shall submit to the Chapter Chair a list of applicants. That paper shall be entitled to membership in the Association for one sports editor, all full-time general sports columnists who regularly cover baseball, and as many reporters as are primarily assigned to cover baseball.
is there a good reason that the voters fill in places 1-7? it seems like 1-4 would suffice, and its pretty irrelevant that there are 4 players who were 7th (and on only one ballot) in the MVP race. It seems like its the equivalent of the #25 spot on a preseason college poll, reserved for your hometown team. I guess my real question is, has the winner ever come down to votes cast in the 7th place spot?
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