from Amazon
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Awards schmawards
Dave Cameron:
For many years, the majority of the BBWAA has defined value as “driving in runners on a winning team”, which is why high RBI sluggers on playoff teams almost always win the award. With the advent of the internet and the coalescence of passionate, enthusiastic baseball fans who like to quantify everything, that definition has come under fire, and rightfully so. As a result, every fall, we see the same articles pop up, just with different names. Stop me if you’ve read this sequence before.
...
In the end, it isn’t an argument about baseball. It’s an argument about the perspective of how the game is seen through various lenses, and in many ways, a disagreement about the progress of a generation. Most of us see baseball in a way that is very different from how our fathers and grandfathers saw it, which is not unlike the generational gap in almost every other area of your life. Does your dad use twitter? Is your grandpa a frequent visitor to the local tapas bar? Do you yell at them for their “ignorance”?
Rob Neyer:
Why do I care? I care because every award tells a story, a story about games and teams and players and ballparks and writers and writers who are also voters who are oh so human. The awards, just like the games and the teams and the standings, wind up being mostly about numbers. But make no mistake: there’s still room in there for plenty of interesting stories. That’s why I care.
I’m with Dave. I don’t care. I used to care about who made the All-Star game, but it was always the same thing: a few deserving players left off, a few players having a great first-half for the first time ever are on, and life goes on. The worst part is that the guys who set the rules and vote on the awards are also the guys who write about it after! Talk about creating and reporting the news. It’s for the same reason that I don’t care about the Oscars.
The only positive thing about the awards is the highlighting of accomplishments. If it was me, I’d leave it as the 5 nominees as the “winners”. There’s no need to highlight one, be it at the Oscars or the Most Outstanding Player.
I also don’t care about the HOF, except for Tim Raines. Sometimes I do irrational things as a result.
That is a very good article by David. He is a very good writer and articulates his thoughts very well. While each of us might have our own definition of “care,” I fully agree with him.