This is one of the craziest stories we have seen in a while: Edinson Volquez of Cincinnati finished fourth in the NL Rookie of the Year race. That wouldn’t be so bad if he was actually a rookie. It isn’t getting much discussion in the news stories covering the voting, but it is plainly spelled out in the MLB.com chart of voting that accompanies the story on winner Geovany Soto. Volquez gets a little asterisk, which denotes that he “received votes despite being ineligible as a rookie.” Now, we’ll be the first to admit that the MLB rules on who is a rookie and who isn’t a rookie can be somewhat confusing. Here they are:

Determining rookie status:
A player shall be considered a rookie unless, during a previous season or seasons, he has (a) exceeded 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the Major Leagues; or (b) accumulated more than 45 days on the active roster of a Major League club or clubs during the period of 25-player limit (excluding time in the military service and time on the disabled list).

What possibly tripped a few voters up is that while Volquez has not pitched 50 innings in any season, he had thrown 80 combined innings in three seasons coming into this year. Therefore, not a rookie. In honor of this presumably honest but rather humbling blunder on the part of the three voters who had Volquez second on their ballots, we would like to present a few more awards to you:

2008 best picture: Pulp Fiction.

2008 Grammy for best new artist: Radiohead.

2008 new sports blog of the year: RandBall.

Fruit of the year: Potato.

Please continue in the comments …

Fasola-link! Soccer and philosophy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 9:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.