I have to apologise? To the BBWAA? Fuck.
It looks like I was wrong. For half a year, I was wrong. I kept saying, over and over, that the chuckleheaded clod-pates at the BBWAA were going to award the AL Cy Young to expensive winner of 19 games, he who pitched tolerably well but was granted an astounding six entire runs per start, hunger-crazed meatloaf fiend Carsten Charles Sabathia. I was sad about this, because King Felix Abraham Hernandez, lord of Seattle, was a whole hell of a lot better, had the same number of (stupid) wins desipite getting only 4.4 runs per game, but didn’t play for a playoff-bound team from New York and would probably get fucked for it.
But, really, I was sad for Zack Greinke, who pitched, kind of appropriately, like a crazy man. He was hilariously good, but he was stranded on the least-relevant team ever in the history of irrelevant teams, where he only won 16 games due to a sad-sack 3.8 runs per game. Clearly he wouldn’t win shit. 16 wins? Kansas City?
Set aside the fact that 16 wins with 3.8 RS/GS is completely insane. Baseball writers don’t think like that. They look at two numbers and three letters. The numbers are whatever comes before W and S, and the letters are NYY. Clearly Sabathia was a lock.
But no! The BBWAA surprised me and Dave and everybody in the whole world by showing a little bit of intelligence. Greinke won the award in a landslide. Hernandez (correctly) came in second, with Verlander third and Sabathia a distant fourth. So I apologise to the BBWAA. You’re not quite as stupid as I thought!
You still have a few awards left to fuck up, though. Get to it!
Addendum, from that article about Greinke’s win:
He failed to get a victory in six starts in which he allowed one run or none.
Can we please finally all agree that wins — by which I mean not actually winning, but the pitching stat misleadingly called "wins" — are complete bullshit and should never be looked at by anybody for any reason ever? We can? Good. That’s a relief. Here I thought I’d have to hear all about fucking wins next year, too.
My guess is, since nobody got to that “magic” 20 wins, they were able to actually look past the “W” column and compare other stats.
If any of the other three guys had reached that 20-win mark, though, I can almost guarantee that nobody would have looked beyond that and that person would have won the Cy.
Comment by Dave | 19 November 2009
You remember before the end of last season, when the standard comment about Mike Mussina was "he’s not Hall of Fame material because he never had a 20-win season?" Fucking BBWAA.
Comment by Darien | 19 November 2009