BBA Awards: Connie Mack

The Baseball Bloggers Association is conducting their post-season awards voting. Today, the Connie Mack Award given to the best managers of the year as determined by the BBA will be announced. The four blogs in the Pittsburgh chapter have elected to do our own chapter voting, then to submit our two ballots to the BBA based on our own consensus. Because transparency is an important part of the BBA awards voting process, it’s my duty s president of the Pittsburgh chapter to post both my votes and the ballots that we submitted to the BBA in advance of last night’s deadline:

I don’t know exactly how to quantify Manager of the Year because it’s so hard to measure exactly what a manager does. Were the Reds and Padres good because of something Dusty Baker or Bud Black did, or were this guys along for the ride with the players? Honestly, I don’t know how anyone really answers this question. I know the award often goes to the manager of the team that exceeds preseason expectations the most, but what if our expectations were just wrong?

For my own ballot, I did something I never though I’d do: I voted for Dusty Baker for manager of the year. His Reds team won 92 games, had the best offense in the National League, and perhaps most surprisingly managed to navigate the NL Central with a young pitching staff. I thought the Reds did a very good job this year with Mike Leake, Travis Wood, and getting Edinson Volquez and Homer Bailey through their injuries. In the end, I voted for Baker over Bud Black because the Reds played well down the stretch when they had to, where the Padres faded towards the end of the season even in a division that ended up weaker than people expected it to be (meaning the Dodgers and especially the Rockies, not the Giants). So this was my ballot for the Pittsburgh chapter’s mini-voting:

1. Dusty Baker
2. Bud Black
3. Bruce Bochy