Baseball Press Finally Making Wise Choices
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Every fall, the voters on the various postseason awards make one award so head-slappingly stupid, so contrary to all reason and common sense, that one is tempted to ignore them entirely and turn to alternatives like the Internet Baseball Awards. Anyone with an Internet connection can vote on these, and in their 14-year history they have avoided such nonsense as the MVP awards given Juan Gonzalez and Mo Vaughn, proving in the process that baseball fans do in fact, as they suspect, know more about the game than the press.
It may turn out that the voters have gotten it wrong this year – Neifi Perez might well be named National League MVP next week – but every award announced this week has either gone to the obviously deserving candidate or to an eminently reasonable one. Why this is so isn’t immediately obvious, but whatever the reason, having one less reason to tear one’s hair out in frustration is always a good thing.
Yesterday’s announcement that Minnesota’s Johann Santana unanimously won the American League Cy Young was, to me, the biggest surprise. While I didn’t actually expect Curt Schilling to win – over the last two-thirds of the season, Santana was as dominant as anyone since Bob Gibson – I expected him to garner a few first place votes. ESPN’s matchless John Kruk is not alone in saying, “I’m just always under the impression that the guy with the most wins is the best pitcher.”
Schilling, of course, won only one more game than Santana while sporting an ERA half a run higher, but just as RBI tallies track better than any other stat to MVP votes, so do win totals track to the Cy Young. Unhappily, had Santana pitched as well as he did but through no fault of his own ended up 16-10, he probably would have lost; nonetheless, the voters’ recognition that pitching well is more important than an outsized ace reputation like Schilling’s is a small victory for rationality in America.
So were the eight first-place votes received by Randy Johnson in the National League Cy Young voting. Johnson was clearly the best pitcher in the league this year.
The Big Unit pitched 30 more innings than Roger Clemens with an ERA 0.40 lower in a tougher ballpark. Clemens, though, went 18-4, while Johnson went 16-14, a difference so great that I find it more cheering that Johnson won as many votes as he did than irritating that he lost.
In any case, this was hardly a mockery like Bob Welch’s 1990 Cy Young. Welch’s ERA that year was more than a run higher than Clemens’s, yet the A’s pitcher took home the award because he finished 27-6. That year’s bizarre voting – Dave Stewart, who was 22-11 to Clemens’s 21-6, and had an ERA more than half a run higher, actually drew three first-place votes of his own – just wouldn’t happen today.
This is a good thing not because the awards are of real consequence, but because voting patterns reflect the conventional wisdom among those who interpret and explain the game for the public. The better that conventional wisdom distinguishes real markers of excellence like preventing runs from fake ones like racking up wins, the better for everyone.
Of course, there is a long way to go. Pittsburgh’s Jason Bay, the National League Rookie of the Year, might have deserved to win the award over San Diego’s Khalil Greene, but the difference was a lot smaller than the first-place voting, which Bay won 25-7, would suggest. Bay did one thing very, very well this season, hitting for a .282 AVG/.358 OBA/.550 SLG line. Greene isn’t as good at any phase of the game as Bay is at hitting, but the sum of his contributions was nearly as valuable.
Greene is a decent fielding shortstop, whereas Bay is a merely adequate corner outfielder. He played in 19 more games than Bay, and he actually hit quite well. His .273/.349/.446 line is very good for a shortstop, especially since he played half his home games in Petco Park, which appears to severely deflate offense.
On the road, Greene hit .301/.353/.543 – quite a lot better than Bay’s road line of .256/.351/.500. I’d rather have had Greene than Bay this year; that so few voters agreed makes me suspect they’re not looking much past the surface, which is a shame.
Still, there was a time, not so long ago, when Bay’s edges of nine points of batting average, 11 home runs and 17 RBI would have been enough to give him a unanimous victory. Like the votes for Johnson, the votes for Greene show an increasing willingness to look at what a player has done in its proper context. You can’t ask much more of the baseball press than that.