I hope your happy, Baseball Writers Association of America. You've gone and screwed up another major award voting. Oh, sure, the winner of the AL MVP hasn't been announced yet, but we all know you are going to do the wrong thing and give the award to Miguel Cabrera. Don't feel too bad about it though, getting things wrong is kind of what you, as a collective, do. It's your thing.
The problem is your "thing" annoys the living shit out of me, partly because the things you foul up are so utterly predictable but also because you have an uncanny knack for using your "thing" to make me care far more about an award that I really shouldn't have any active concern over. I guess that is your "other thing."
I can't begin to tell you how much I don't want to care about who is announced as the winner of the AL MVP this Thursday, but I do. I care SO much. But I care for the wrong reasons. I care because Mike Trout will not win AL MVP not because he isn't the best player, but because I get the sense that many BBWAA voters will cast their ballot for Miguel Cabrera less because of what Miggy did and more because they want to give a giant middle finger to the sabermetric community.
Back when I could still stomach the articles, I was pretty much running one more more column per day in the daily links here at Monkey with a Halo that featured some national, regional or local columnist expressing their support for Miggy as MVP but almost none of them could resist the temptation to make derisive comments and ad hominem attacks at statisticians and bloggers/writers that are pro-sabermetrics.
People were accussed of living in their mother's basements. Calculators were labeled as devices of evil. The phrase "WAR, what is it good for?" was used ad nauseum, without irony.
With every uninformed critique of Wins Above Replacement and total dismissal of the value of defense and baserunning, it became painfully clear that Cabrera was going to get votes because certain writers basically wanted to say, "Hey, piss off, nerds! I like RBIs and I don't care what you think about them!" And that's what really gets my vote. Thsi vote isn't about the players getting the votes, its civil war. North vs. South. Red vs. Blue. Old school vs. New school. Good vs. Evil.
It's just… so… very… exhausting… And it is so not what the award is about. The Most Valuable Player award is about the player, or it should be. This year it is very clearly about the schools of thought in baseball. Even I am falling into that trap right now just by authoring this diatribe. I mean, I'm over 400 words deep and I have yet to even mention that I have an immense amount respect for the season Cabrera had. There is no doubt that he deserves to win the MVP this season. There is also no doubt that Mike Trout deserves to win it too, probably more so. That's what this should be about, praising both players for tremendous seasons.
But I'm not. Instead I'm getting worked up over all the other bullshit that shouldn't be getting attention. You win, BBWAA. Your horrible, stupid way of doing things always wins.
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