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And The Award Goes To...

By Al Yellon

... who cares.

Really.

Albert Pujols won the NL MVP today. Derrek Lee got one first-place vote, one second-place vote, and thirty third-place votes, so you see where the MSM saw him.

Lee had a fantastic offensive season. So did Pujols. Would the Cardinals have won the division without him? Probably, since their success was based mainly on pitching this year.

Where would the Cubs have finished without Lee? Somewhere in Triple-A, most likely.

This is why I haven't written much about this year's awards, which are now complete. My SB Nation colleague Larry over at the Cardinals blog Viva El Birdos put it quite well in a post over the weekend:

when it comes to these awards, the sabermetricians have got it all wrong. they're attempting to impose "objective" criteria and standards on awards that were never meant to be objective. we can, thanks to sabermetrics, filter out park effects, run support, defensive support, bullpen support, and numerous other pollutants from a pitcher's stat line and quantify his performance down to fractions of runs. but that does not mean we should replace the ill-informed dolts who vote on these awards with a committee of all-knowing sabermetricians. i sometimes think that's what some people want -- do away with the voting and replace it with rote mathematical analysis that measures pure ability. we could then simply plug everyone's numbers into the formula, run the program, and know with certainty who the real cy young is.

while we're at it, maybe we should just do away with the playoffs too.

And that's the problem with these awards. They are subjective. Most of us don't agree with many of the writers' selections, but that's what the system calls for, so that's what we're stuck with. Maybe a pure system of math would do it, but that'd be pretty boring, wouldn't it? We have much more fun this way, arguing about it.

One note on the voting results: Lee was the only Cub who got any votes at all. I'd have thought Aramis Ramirez might have received a vote or three, but most likely, falling off the radar in September cost him a chance at any votes at all.

And note also that only two members of the NL Champion Astros -- Morgan Ensberg (4th) and Lance Berkman (14th) finished in the top twenty.

Finally today, MLB and the MLBPA came to an agreement on a tougher steroid policy, in which Bud Selig actually got his way:

The new agreement calls for first-time offenders to be suspended for 50 games, second-time offenders to be suspended for 100 games and third-time offenders to be banished from baseball for life. The penalties are identical to those proposed by Commissioner Bud Selig earlier this year.

It'll be interesting to see who's the first to go down from this new agreement. 50 games is almost 1/3 of a season.

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