Baseball Award Predictions

It didn't take long for baseball's "Hot Stove League" (referring to the rumors and wheeling-and-dealing of the offseason) to make major headlines.

Here are my predictions for who will win the major awards in Major League Baseball as well as my opinion of who should win. You can check out baseball stats here.

Let's start with the National League.

Manager of the Year: Clint Hurdle of the Rockies will win and should win.

Rookie of the Year: Troy Tulowitzki of the Rockies will win, but Ryan Braun should win (by a nose). In truth, I wouldn't be unhappy with either result. Braun gets serious demerits for defense and he didn't start the year in the Majors, but his overwhelming offensive numbers are enough to make up for this in my mind.

Cy Young: This award begins and ends with Jake Peavy. Nobody else is even close. Honorable mentions go out to Brandon Webb, John Smoltz, and Brad Penny.

MVP: Jimmy Rollins will win the award, but I don't think he should. (Note that if teammate Chase Utley hadn't gotten injured, then he likely would have been the best man for the award. In my mind, he was definitely the best choice at the time he got injured.) I would vote for David Wright with Matt Holliday taking second place on my list. (Holliday has an outside shot of winning.) Honorable mentions go to Holliday, Prince Fielder, Chase Utley (even with the injury), and Chipper Jones (who also gets knocked a bit from missing time with injuries), Albert Pujols (in his so-called "off year"), Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez, and Rollins. (I think Rollins would barely make my top 10, by the way. He had a fantastic year, but lots of people had better ones.)


Here are my thoughts on the American League:

Manager of the Year: Joe Torre (for both who it will be and who it should be). Seriously. And he wouldn't be the first Manager of the Year who was with a different team the next year. I believe the last time it happened was with Joe Girardi (!) of the Marlins, who was fired both unofficially and officially. (He and his bosses didn't get along at along.) I would have considered picking the Mariners manager, but they had more than one skipper this year.

Rookie of the Year: Dustin Pedroia will and should win. Honorable mentions go to Brian Bannister and Daisuke Matsuzaka.

Cy Young: C.C. Sabathia should win, but I suspect that Josh Beckett will win. (I can't ignore the 40 extra innings that Sabathia pitched...) Honorable mentions go to Beckett, John Lackey, Fausto Carmona, and Dan Haren, and Johan Santana. Erik Bedard was having a great year before his season ended with an injury. Also, take a look what Santana did in his so-called "off year." Most pitchers would kill for a season like that (personally, I would kill for a Nobel Peace Prize), and his record was basically the product of bad run support and lots of games against Sabathia and Carmona (and being somewhat less dominant than usual, though still extremely good).

MVP: Alex Rodriguez. Duh. He will and should win. It won't be quite unanimous, though, as I expect Maggio Ordonez to pick up a couple of first place votes. Honorable mentions go out to Ordonez, Vladimir Guerrero, Carlos Pena, David Ortiz (in his so-called "off year" ... do people even realize there are more things going on offensively than the sheer number of home runs?), and Jorge Posada.



Also, I'd like to make a quick point about defensive stats. Advances in examining defense have progressed to the point where one can analyze defense much more intelligently than one could before. You can find some simple defensive statistics here. You can see, for example, that Derek Jeter had the worst range among all American League shortstops this year. He also had the worst zone rating among AL shortstops by a huge margin. (The differential between Jeter and the second worst shortstop with that metric was about the same between that second worst shortstop and the middle of the pack. With range factor, one only goes about 1/3 of the way of the pack, but Jeter also lags way behind even the second to last person here.) And yet, Jeter keeps winning gold gloves for basically two reasons: (1) He gets a lot of publicity because of his offense and (2) he gets a lot of publicity because he's a Yankee (and has a lot of idiots like announcer Michael Kay blindly espousing his virtues). I would probably give this Glove Glove to Juan Uribe, but Orlando Cabrera would also be a good choice. But not Derek Jeter, who is basically an immobile brick wall masquerading as a shortstop. (Don't get me wrong. Jeter is a fantastic offensive player who plays hard and will deservedly get a spot in the Hall of Fame. But he's a shitty defensive shortstop, and it's absurd that he's getting Gold Gloves.)