Every now and again, things go spectacularly, terrifically and disastrously wrong.

               Sometimes, on a misguided trip to meet your girlfriend’s parents, you give some guy the finger for cutting you off on the highway, only to stand face-to-face with him as he hugs your future ex close. Hoping to at least endear yourself to her mother, you compliment Mom’s rather strange hairdo. Naturally, she’s recovering from cancer, and she can only choke out a “That’s….not…funny” as she snatches the wig from her scalp and rushes out of the room. Luckily, you narrowly avoid the father’s foot on your way out the door, but that brief respite lasts only as long as it takes to back over the family cat, previously curled up under your tires, and now simply curled. All this because at some point in history, parents decided that they would like to put a face to the name in their nightmares.

               Of course, sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes your grossest errors aren’t so obvious, save in retrospect. Sometimes you are faultless, trying to do your job, and then the past, the present and all of future recorded history conspires to rise up against you and collectively smack you silly.

               Sometimes you just make Bandwagonesque the Album of the Year.

               1991 changed a lot of things. There was a war in Iraq, trouble in the Balkans and a mostly Russian Empire was crumbling under unsustainable disparities in wealth and rights. A rich tycoon was found to have stolen billions from his clients in hopes of paying off loans he never should have received from banks who refused to practice due diligence. Domestically, racial tensions rose and a minority Supreme Court nominee was grilled for reasons almost entirely unrelated to the nominee’s capacity to complete the job. It was clearly a completely different time.

               I kid, of course. The year WAS very different, and very important. 1991 began with a near intact USSR refusing to recognize Lithuania’s declaration of independence and ended with the Balkans fully recognized and sovereign. Yugoslavia exploded, leaving only beautiful Slovenia out of a war that created the geographic nexus of an unfortunate bridge of genocide between the Nazis of Western Europe and the Asian and African disasters of the 1970s. Not everything was doom and gloom, as the US lifted sanctions against South Africa, and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and Jeffrey Dahmer were both put out of business. The FDA approved ddl (now called Videx, generally), one of the most prominent drugs used to fight AIDS, which was good timing for Magic Johnson, who was forced to disclose his condition to the world, but terrible for Freddie Mercury, who succumbed to the disease in November.

               At one point or another, I probably read every issue of Spin released from its inception through 1996. I would troll through back issues looking for interesting stories I’d never heard, or read reviews of albums that had been lost in the avalanche of music released in the mid ‘90s. I worked at the public library, and I took advantage of the light work and heavy archives to immerse myself in the world of popular (and unpopular) music.

               The early days of Spin were a revelation, a direct sneering challenge to a Rolling Stone which had become self-important and a part of the establishment it claimed to detest. Spin championed college rock, hip-hop, and any other form of musical expression that was good, and proudly displayed women and minority artists on its covers.The writers covered heavy subjects with a light touch, and more than one presumed idiot of a front man shook my preconceptions with well-thought-out pieces on music, politics or life. The magazine was written by and for people who took music seriously, and it was bearing witness to a musical landscape more prismatic than perhaps any other time in history.

               The early 80s had seen disco banished by proto-punk and New Wave, movements that started out with inexact (and interchangeable) definitions, as well as the rise of rap, almost unrecognizable from where that genre is today. Michael Jackson owned pop while super groups like Talking Heads, R.E.M. and U2 began racking up platinum record after platinum record. Hair bands threatened to suck the rest of the decade into oblivion before its middle was attacked from both ends, first from pure hard rock and then from grunge and alternative. Grunge in turn broke into pieces, further increasing alternative rock’s presence while also shedding listeners to a newly revived pop scene. By the mid ‘90s, we had old stalwarts releasing bloated albums while boy bands and girl pop raided The Mickey Mouse Club to find the next big meal ticket. Rap, Hip-Hop and R&B redux crossed the racial divide and the Brits made a second run at America.

               And right in the chronological middle, amid all the chaos, 1991. It started out innocently enough, with January giving us solo albums by Susanna Hoffs and David Lee Roth, Jesus Jones’ follow-up to Liquidizer, and VH1 list-filler Gerardo’s Mo’ Ritmo and the single “Rico Suave.” Basically the same crap that people had been listening to for the last 2-3 years. And then the world exploded.

               Michael Stipe and company released Out of Time, growing the base they built in the Green and Document years into a full-scale following, and earning themselves a few Grammy’s in the process. The alterna-rout was on and bands like Poison, Warrant and Ratt heard the tolling bells. With debut (or near-debut) albums from Live, Dave Matthews Band, Green Day and Phish, the future was assured. Just to make sure that there was no Hair Metal comeback after Guns ‘N’ Roses released Use Your Illusion I & II, U2 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Achtung Baby, and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, respectively. Metallica released the untitled/self-titled “Black Album,” effectively taking the hard rock aspect of hair into the next decade while consequently pissing off its more hardcore followers, leaving Mötley Crüe’s October release for Decade of Decadence to seem more like a eulogy for the entire movement than it did a compilation of hits.

               In other realms, Garth Brooks was issuing in a new age of country pop, perhaps the longest living genre from that era, and bands like Massive Attack were creating entirely new areas (in their case, trip hop) just for fun. Contemporary Christian music was on the rise, and rap saw its future savior** arrive with the release of the simply awful 2Pacalypse Now. Hip-Hop and alternative rap saw meaningful releases by De La Soul, Dream Warriors, Poor Righteous Teachers and A Tribe Called Quest, whose Low End Theory still resonates. Everything was in flux, and I haven’t even mentioned the most meaningful breakthrough of all.

               In retrospect, we could probably see grunge coming. Anytime you get a large enough number of underrepresented groups in any part of society, be it politically, socially, economically or (as here) artistically, someone fills the void. Sometimes the void is filled from within, as members of those disaffected groups rise to the vanguard and champion the group, and sometimes from without, where individuals from outside the groups collect followers and backing by representing (or claiming to represent) the group’s interest. By the last 80s and early 90s, music was more or less broken for a large percentage of people and grunge was (ironically in some ways) able to put some of it back together.

               While risking overgeneralization here, I think it would be fair to say that most of grunge’s audience was comprised of middle-class whites between the ages of 13 and 40. There were exceptions, of course, but let’s assume (correctly I believe) that around 95-98% of grunge’s following can be counted in that group. By 1990, this group was musically disenfranchised.

               Hair metal was disintegrating, becoming more farcical by the day. Drugs had torn up the scene, and tales of excess were only really fun the first two or three hundred times you hear them. The music got worse, and the band members less identifiable. Rap had moved from deep social commentary with a nice beat and universal message to deep social commentary on tracks that couldn’t be played on the radio and tended towards the extreme.

               But then again, crack had been introduced, destroyed vast portions of the population and entire cities to boot, and demanded something a little more extreme. I believe the “gangsta” era gets a terrible rap*** for the violence espoused and the language used, if only because I find it nearly impossible to imagine being able to refrain from the same given what surrounded the artists.

               The rest of the genres were equally limp. What we now call “Classic” Rock had split into a million pieces, with New Wave bands exploding and contracting like supernovas, college rock still clutching onto the early 80s and punk finding that it’s difficult to sustain such an overwhelming energy for more than a decade. Enter the Reagan/Bush I years, a decrease in Cold War antipathy and fears and you’re left with an entire generation of kids without a defining ethos, drive, fear or musical genre. And thus, enter grunge.

               You can read an entire year’s worth of material on Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Ten and Nevermind, Cobain and Vedder, or just grunge. I suggest you do, if only because it’s likely to be the only important musical movement that you fully live through, and the aftershocks are still controlling what you listen to. All that being true, I don’t have anything new to offer. I simply want to remind you what it was like in 1991, what one song, one album, or one month of releases (and did) do. And I want to remind you that, despite all of that, Nevermind was not Spin’s Album of the Year.

               Clear mistakes in subjective awards are not as common as you might believe. People tend to get it right, or more exactly, right enough. If you think about it long enough, (a) you’ll want to kill yourself, but also (b) you’ll realize that there are only really two ways to make a clear and obvious mistake in a subjective award vote:

               1.) Having a host of viable choices, each of which could reasonably satisfy the requirements for the award, you select a non-viable choice, which is dominated in every possible way by the other choices.

               2.) There exists a choice that obviously dominates all others in the underlying requirements, yet you pick one of a lesser group.

Many would argue that Spin made the second of these mistakes in 1991, and they may very well be right. However, I think it most accurate (and safest) to say that they definitely made the first of these mistakes and probably made the second.

               Look, Bandwagonesque is a good album.**** I will not dispute that. It holds up better than some discs from that era, and in some years it might actually be in that large group of albums whence Spin, forced to select a best album from a league of equals, would draw the eventual winner. But to make that claim in 1991, even without the benefit of hindsight, is ludicrous.***** The list of albums more important, more commercial, more influential and simply better is expansive. Perhaps most importantly, Bandwagonesque isn’t even the best indie rock album of its year, a designation that likely belongs to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Spin got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, attempting to be too clever by half.****** Instead, it failed massively in one of the most public ways possible. It’s telling that, in their “100 Greatest Albums of 1985-2005” (covering their 20 years of existence to that point), Bandwagonesque did not make the cut, while Nevermind (3^rd overall), Achtung Baby (11^th), Loveless (22^nd), The Low End Theory (38^th), De La Soul is Dead (60^th), Ten (93^rd) and Spiderland (94^th) all did.

               Like Christmas, the Major League Baseball Awards Season comes earlier and earlier every year. We have already seen a small interwebs battle over the American League MVP award, sparked by a largely innocent “tweet” extolling the virtues of Mark Teixeira. I don’t mind this season creep,******* as it gives everyone a chance to focus on the individual stories that will be lost when late September and October roll around. Perhaps more importantly for this year, it’ll also be the last time during the season that the “shoulda-wons” are in the public eye. Because sadly, I have a feeling that, in at least two races, we’re about to see some Bandwagonesque-esque badness.

               The American League MVP award has “mistake number 2” from above written all over it. Joe Mauer leads the American League in the following categories:

Batting Average, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Percentage, Adjusted OPS+, Runs Created, Adjusted Batting Runs, Adjusted Batting Wins, Offensive Winning Percentage, VORP, EqA, EqR, RAR, RAP, RARP, wOBA and wRAA

 It’s possible I missed one or two others. Mauer also happens to be a well above average catcher, some of which is figured in the stats above.

               Mark Teixeira, Miguel Cabrera, Derek Jeter and some as yet unknown are basically stuck with leads in the following:

Appearances in a 2009 Playoff Series (100+ players tied for first with 1)

It’s somewhat sad we’re still at this point, where 6 homers and some RBIs can make a playoff-bound 1b a credible threat to a dominant catcher on an average team, but it is where we are, and I fully expect there to be (a) a mistake made this year, (b) the standard “outrage” among cognoscenti with the qualification that it “doesn’t really matter, anyway” and (c) continuous mentions over the next ten years about the inherent unfairness, belying the claims made in the second half of (b).

               If the Mauer situation presents a purely “number 2” mistake as some puerile writer may call it, the AL Cy Young Award could be a giant dumping of the bed in either form. There is a good chance that there will be a dominant player ala Mauer, and even if he falls back to Earth, there will be a clear group of deserving surpassed by a man who hasn’t achieved to the same level as them.

               Here are four non-random pitching lines:

At least half of you can see where this is going. The third and fourth lines are the 2005 stats for Bartolo Colon and Johan Santana, respectively. Bartolo Colon won that year, in case you haven’t heard. The first two lines?

               They’re the pro-rated projections for this season of Zack Greinke and C.C. Sabathia. And I have a feeling they’re a little generous to Greinke and light on CC in the wins category. And if they are anywhere near on the mark, another relatively rotund man will steal an award from a lithe freak show.

               I don’t want to jump all over C.C., because I love watching him pitch nearly as much as I love watching Greinke spin 65 mph curves after 95 mph heat. He’s not actively lobbying for the award, and if he continues his insane pace from the past 6-7 starts, he might put himself in the conversation should Greinke falter. But right now, he’s at the very bottom of a group of 4-5 guys who aren’t particularly close to Zack.

               By almost any measure of objective value, Greinke is 15-20% ahead of any other AL pitcher. He’s credited with 7.6 Wins Above Replacement and 68.6 Runs Above Replacement. Justin Verlander sits second place in the AL for both, at 6.2 and 58.1, respectively. The Royal ace also leads all of MLB in SNLVAR and VORP, if you prefer Prospectus stats. By any objective measure, he is the best pitcher in the league.

               His team, however, is not the best anything in the game. In his last 11 games, Greinke has thrown 75 innings of 2.88 ERA ball with a 1.16 WHIP and 88 strikeouts. He’s gone 3-5 in that time. His team lost games 1-0, 2-0, 3-1 and 4-2 twice (once while leading 2-1 after Greinke left). This is the stuff that snubs are made of. In his last 11 games, Sabathia has thrown 77+ innings, posting a 3.13 ERA, 1.16 WHIP and 78 Ks. Similar, if slightly worse, numbers. But Sabathia has made up mythical ground in the race for the Cy during this span because he won 8 of these 11 games, while taking only two losses.********

               Sabathia has a slightly bigger problem, actually: he’s not clearly been better than Verlander, Roy Halladay or Felix Hernandez. But here again, the playoff team “qualification” comes into play. Verlander is probably going to the Divisional Series, the other two most certainly are not. In a non-Greinke year, any of these players’ seasons could probably rate a first-place vote or two, but for some reason, we talk only about Sabathia’s chances. Which gives us the possibility of making BOTH of the mistakes associated with subjective awards in one year. Genius.

Just for fun, here’s what Bill’s new system of Season Scores predicts, just based on year-to-date statistics:

Very interesting, in that I would bet that Not So Ancient Mariner finishes third at best in the voting. We shall see, obviously these numbers will change.

               In the end, the awards may not matter to callous sportswriters who (rightfully) hate the system that chooses them. But they clearly matter to the players, the teams, the fans, the agents and anyone else who sometimes likes to stroll through records books to see who dominated a facet of the game that year. Putting the wrong name there isn’t de facto meaningless; it’s meaningless because we put the wrong name there too frequently.