BBA: Willie Mays Award

The Baseball Bloggers Association is conducting their post-season awards voting. Today, the Willie Mays Award given to the best rookies of 2010 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 as president of the Pittsburgh chapter to post both my votes and the ballots that we submitted to the BBA in advance of today’s:

Can I be honest about something? The debate surrounding this year’s Rookie of the Year Award makes me queasy. Last year, Andrew McCutchen finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting, ostensibly because he hadn’t played enough (108 games), despite being the National League’s best rookie (he did win the BBA award fairly handily, at least). This year, we’ve got two candidates with almost identical rate stats in Jason Heyward and Buster Posey (Heyward’s final OPS+ was 131, Posey’s was 129), but the favorite is Posey, who only played in 108 games.

I’m not saying Posey shouldn’t be considered for the award. I think he should. He had a phenomenal rookie year and if he wins the award, I think it’ll be a deserving win for him. But if it does, it will confirm for me that Andrew McCutchen would’ve had a better chance of winning last year’s award if he played in Alaska.

Anyways, on my own personal ballot, I’ve got Heyward at the top. Playing more games than Posey was one of the reasons I tabbed him, but the biggest reason is his on-base percentage. At the age of 20 and playing every day, the kid got on base at a .393 clip. That’s silly. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but holy crap he’s gonna be a special player. Posey gets my second place vote. My third place vote went to Mike Stanton, who’s season was kind of like Pedro Alvarez’s only Stanton’s younger and has more power. So my final ballot that was submitted to the Pittsburgh chapter was:

1. Jason Heyward
2. Buster Posey
3. Mike Stanton