from Amazon
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Jose Bautista, linguist: “Take your nose out of the dictionary and watch the game!”
Or words to that effect.
Great stuff from Jose Bautista:
The Cy Young Award is not given to the person whose season most resembles one of those by Cy Young. It’s just the best season.
Wonderful!
Taken literally, the Cy Young Award would have to go to the guy who embodies the spirit and talent level and skill toolset of Cy Young. After all, if you had a Tim Wakefield Award, wouldn’t that go to the best knuckleballer? So, the presumption is that you don’t take the actual name of the Award literally, as you debate what each single word means. The Hall of Fame is after all just a cool name. Would the Hall of Greats, or the Hall of Outstanding Performers really cut it? No, Hall of Fame is the name, and it’s just a name. The spirit of the Hall of Fame award is for outstanding lifetime achievement.
So, he zings those journalists:
This controversy could all be avoided, he said, if the voters would stop fretting about that word that he considers to be nothing more than part of the award’s name, not some vague idea to be debated endlessly.
“So, the MVP award should be whatever the guidelines are, and you follow that.”
Wonderful. So, instead of fretting endlessly by going to the dictionary and being beholden to the literal word of “valuable” (which is hardly clear cut anyway), you rely on the actual guidelines for the award. Of course, the guidelines themselves uses “value” in it, so, we’re back to the dictionary. In the CFL, they have the Schenley awards for Most Outstanding Players in various categories. These are, after all, individual awards.
The idea to link an individual award to the performance of other players on your team is ridiculous. And the idea that Jose Bautista would somehow impact his team more if the rest of his team was better is also silly. Unless of course what you care about in terms of impact is reaching the post-season. But, then we have to go back to the guidelines that specifically says that “The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.”
The BBWAA is brilliant in its confusion and ambiguity. They have horribly written guidelines for MVP, which causes the annual cycle of discussion among fans, and guarantees each baseball writer in the country one article that their newspapers are going to pay them 1000$ to write. (With 1000 writers, it’s a million-dollar idea!)
And they have NO guidelines whatsoever for the Cy Young award. It’s true! The only instructions the writers are given is the actual name on the plaque, which is Most Outstanding Pitcher. Basically, the voters are trusted with the supremely obvious that you are giving an individual award to the individual that deserves it the most. There’s no controversy about it, and no editor is going to pay them to write an article on the non-controversy.
I tip my hat to you, BBWAA overseers. George Orwell couldn’t have done it better.
And look! I don’t care a bit about this award, and you’ve got me writing at length about it. My head is about to explode at the circular irrationality of it all.
I’m actually intrigued by the inanity of people emphasizing the word “value” in MVP. Baseball has given out the award for what, 75 years? By now—hell, by the second time it was given out—there should be some sort of common law definition of what the Most Valuable Player is.
It’s like a court having to interpret what a word means for the purposes of a statute. If some binding authority says you have to interpret it this way, then you have to interpret that way, and precedent is binding unless some higher authority wants to change its mind. You don’t get to go around redefining words with your interpretation.
BBWAA of course has horrible guidelines. Voters shouldn’t be looking in the dictionary for the word value—they should be looking at the meaning that past voters have ascribed to it. But there’s probably no consistency there either, so we’ve just got a big mess on our hands. The only solution is for BBWAA to actually define what it means by “value”, or else we’ll be forever besieged by people saying, “But it’s not BEST, it’s Most VALUABLE Player!”