The post-season awards for 2007 will begin escaping from a locked vault in Jerome Holtzman’s basement sometime next week, and I thought I would get a head start on the process with a few random comments about who will (and should) win the major awards. Unfortunately four of the six major awards are pretty obvious and the other two involve Red Sox players, which makes it hard for me to comment with what an impartial observer would call impartiality, so. . .don’t know how useful my insight here will be. But here goes anyway, starting with the most obvious and working down to the least:
The American League MVP will and should be Alex Rodriguez.
The National League Cy Young award, unless history has gone de-lala, will go to Jake Peavy. (Gone De-lala, by the way, is a British colloquial expression for madness, which the British use just often enough to lose sight of how silly it sounds, so if you read British crime books, sometimes in the midst of a discussion of some horrible unsolved string of six hatchet murders, the author will suggest the possibility that some janitor had gone de-lala. It seems really inapt.
Since I’m already into this digression and I don’t have an editor to stop me, I think I’ll jump in with both feet. The psychological community no longer uses terms like “madness” and “insanity”, having set aside not merely these terms but the whole concept. To a psychiatrist there just really isn’t any such thing anymore as “insanity”. The concept of “insanity” still exists, but it exists now as a legal construct—innocent by reason of insanity—with the incongruous result that whenever a person claims to be innocent by reason of insanity, psychiatrists are hired to give learned testimony in regard to the precise and proper application of a term which they never actually use in any other context.
Psychiatrists now invent new terms for different kinds of odd mental conditions more often than sabermetricians invent new ways to rank power hitters, which is ironic because there already exist in English more terms and expressions for craziness than for anything else, including sex. Mad, crazy, loony, loopy, goofy, nuts, nuttier than a bedbug, bats in the belfry, bonkers, wacko, crackers, out of his skull, spacey, afflicted, demented, disordered, distraught, buggy, fruity, loco, screwy, off your rocker, daffy, gaga, cuckoo, ding-a-ling, kook, lunatic. . .it goes on without end. Not playing with a full deck. Elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top. Touched in the head. Barmy, daft, nutter. Mad as a hatter.
It always seemed to me that, rather than inventing new terms for specific kinds of looniness, like “marginal personality disorder”, what psychologists should do is start systematically co-opting the old terms. Then, for example, when somebody goes round the bend and starts lobbing hand grenades at his neighbors, rather than having a debate about whether the person was a paranoid schizophrenic or suffered from pathological narcissism, we could have a learned debate about whether he was nutty as a fruitcake or just a dingbat. This would have the same practical effect, and it would be a lot more entertaining.)
OK, back to baseball. The National League MVP award is also obvious, not because it is obvious who the most valuable player was, but because it seems pretty obvious who fits the profile. The first person considered for the MVP Award has always been and still is the league leader in RBI. The league leader in RBI will win the MVP award if he
1) plays for a team that makes post-season play, or
2) plays for a team which has a surprisingly good season.
Since Matt Holliday plays for a team which did both of these things, he seems qualified to accept the honor. He probably wasn’t truly the league’s best player, but his Season Score—a statement of how impressive his numbers were, without defense and without park adjustments—was easily the highest in the NL, another indication that he is the likely winner. His season score was 496—60 points ahead of second-place David Wright.
In the American League, for much of the summer announcers said that Magglio Ordonez would be an easy MVP selection in a normal season, but, with A-Rod doing what he was doing, this wasn’t an normal season. I cringe when announcers say things like that, but in this case it may have been true. Ordonez’ Season Score of 503 was higher than any major league player since Barry Bonds’ last great season in 2004—but still 30 points behind A-Rod (who was still a few points behind Bonds in ’04.)
Holliday’s teammate Troy Tulowitski should and will win the NL Rookie of the Year award, I think. . ..he is the most valuable rookie, anyway, and certainly doesn’t seem to have lacked attention.
In an article for a book, intended for wide circulation, I wrote that Tulowitski was along the lines of Cal Ripken. But actually, Tulowitski is much more in the model of an earlier Baltimore shortstop, Ron Hansen. I didn’t bring up Hansen in the article because 90% of the audience wouldn’t know who he was. Hansen won the AL Rookie of the Year Award in 1960 with numbers reasonably comparable to Tulowitski’s this year--.255 with 22 homers, 86 RBI, 69 walks. Like Tulowitski he was 6-foot-3 and very muscular, but also quite athletic. Like Tulowitski, he was 22 years old in his rookie season. Nobody remembers him because he got hurt and didn’t have the career he could have had. At his best—in ’60 and ’64--he was a hell of a player. He also turned an un-assisted triple play, oddly enough.
I know I wrote in some book that Hansen was an unusual type of player, a sort of historical oddity. Joe Gordon was similar, although Gordon was a second baseman. Gordon, like Hansen and Tulowitski, was a power hitter and not a fast runner, but was an acrobatic middle infielder.
This brings us to the two awards which are least clear, which are also the two for which Red Sox players are candidates. A man named James Lincoln Ray, writing for Suite101.com, says that the top four American League Rookie of the Year candidates are:
1. Dustin Pedroia
2. Brian Bannister
3. Daisuke Matzusaka
4. Hideki Okajima
I will quote him because I couldn’t say that myself. . .three Red Sox and a Royal, I’d get hammered. There are others. . .Delmon Young, Jeremy Guthrie, Travis Buck, Reggie Willits, Akinori Iwamura. (By the way, did you realize that if you combined Iwamura and Okajima, you would have Iwo Jima?) Anyway, that’s nine; I’ve got a finger left over here. Can I find a tenth? Alex Gordon? Win Shares for those top ten:
Dustin Pedroia 18
Delmon Young 17
Reggie Willits 14
Akinori Iwamura 13
Joakim Soria 13
Alex Gordon 12
Jeremy Guthrie 12
Daisuke Matsuzaka 12
Hideki Okajima 11
Brian Bannister 11
Travis Buck 10
That’s eleven; I added Soria when I realized that he actually had more Win Shares than most of the other guys. I am falling back on objective tests in an effort to avoid being prejudiced by my proximity to the midg. ...I mean, subject. Another objective measure is the Season Scores, which I introduced in an article posted here a few months ago:
Dustin Pedroia 254
Delmon Young 234
Akinori Iwamura 178
Alex Gordon 170
Reggie Willits 163
Daisuke Matsuzaka 158
Joakim Soria 106
Jeremy Guthrie 105
Travis Buck 103
Brian Bannister 103
Hideki Okajima 81
Essentially pretty much the same list. Pedroia could get squeezed out in the MVP voting because the three Red Sox rookies will split the vote. . .could happen. I don’t sense that it will.
Eighteen Win Shares and a season score of 254 are normal Rookie-of-the-Year credentials, by the way; Tulowitski is at 24 and 313, which is a little above the Rookie of the Year norms. Anything in that area, you’re a candidate. We see Rookies of the Year sometimes with 12 Win Shares (and less) and Season Scores under 200. These are the Win Shares and season scores for the last five American League Rookies of the Year:
    Win Season
Year Player Shares Score
2002 Eric Hinske 22 303
2003 Angel Berroa 16 260
2004 Bobby Crosby 14 175
2005 Huston Street 16 165
2006 Justin Verlander 15 176
2007 Dustin Pedroia 18 254
Now, the American League Cy Young. The American League Cy Young contest probably comes down to C. C. Sabathia vs. Josh Beckett—with apologies to John Lackey, J. J. Putz, Justin Verlander and Fausto Carmona, but it does. Having seen Beckett pitch all year, I felt that he should win the Award, for reasons that became apparent in the post season, when Beckett got to show off how good he really is.
Nonetheless, the award is given off the regular season, and these same indicators that I just used to point to Dustin Pedroia as the Rookie of the Year point to Sabathia as the Cy Young winner. Sabathia had more Win Shares (24-18), and a higher Season Score (305-293).
The Cy Young Award is different in this way: that we have published formulas to predict who will win the Cy Young Award based on their stats. I have made up (and published) formulas like this not only once, but actually several times; it is among my obsessions. In an article in the Neyer/James Pitcher’s Guide, I showed that the Cy Young Award could be predicted with 80% accuracy by this formula:
Wins times 6
Minus Losses times 2
Plus Strikeouts divided by 12
Plus Saves times 2.5
Plus Shutouts
Plus Runs Saved
Plus 12 points for pitching for a first-place team
Runs Saved here are figured as “runs not allowed by this pitcher, compared to a pitcher pitching the same number of innings with an ERA of 5.00.” Let’s compare Beckett and Sabathia by this formula
Wins times 6   20 X 6 = 120 19 X 6 = 114
Minus Losses times 2 7 X 2 = -14 7 X 2 = -14
Plus Strikeouts divided by 12 194/12 = 16.17 209/12 = 17.42
Plus Saves times 2.5 0 0
Plus Shutouts   1 1
Plus Runs Saved 38.48 47.89
Plus 12 points ; 12 12
Total   173.65 178.31
The formula predicts that Sabathia will win it in a close vote. I have other formulas, but. . .let’s leave it at that. Anything else I might say would be biased and of no use.
If Sabathia wins it, I predict a pretty good media furor. The Boston media was on Beckett’s side anyway, sort of expecting him to win it because he was the only 20-game winner, and the post season has created a firm conviction that he’s the best pitcher there is right now. They’re poised to yowl if he doesn’t win the award.
Hey, it’s been great. For many years I have wanted to have some way to interact with my audience in real time, to comment on things as they happen and get feedback. I’ve finally got it, in this site. It’s been fun.