Yesterday I gave the commenter Bill Brimmer some grief. Today I offer him praise for this fine piece of work:

OBITUARIES

Twins Minnesota, 48, passed away after a recent sudden illness due to heart failure, travel fatigue, and the curse of Little Nicky Punto. Will be remembered for, at various times, significant scuffling, bouts of getting after it, and frequent battling their tails off.

Survivors include T.C. Bear and his wife Goldy Gopher, and amazingly, Carl Pohlad.

A bullpen is preferred in lieu of flowers.

Arrangements by John Gordon Funeral Services, ‘Touching ‘Em All’ for eighteen, correct that, nineteen years.

A couple other notes:

*LaVelle had a post yesterday on his blog asking commenters to submit questions. There’s a lot of good stuff there and I’m eagerly awaiting his answers.

*There was a comment yesterday about Jonah Keri’s column on espn.com in which he makes a comment that Morneau isn’t as worthy an MVP choice as a number of others. More interesting is the part of the column that takes about the season in its entirety — so far. Here it is.

*Who should be the MVP? Can it be a pitcher? I don’t subscribe to the theory that closer is the most overrated position in baseball, which is advanced by Jim Caple, among others. At the same time, I wouldn’t vote for a closer (that would be Francisco Rodriguez of the Angels) for MVP because they simply aren’t in the game enough to be the most valuable player on their own team — much less in the entire league.

That being said, I was an MVP voter in 1984 and I voted for Detroit closer Guillermo Hernandez.

Have I changed my mind.

Nope. The closer’s role has changed that much over time.

Look at these numbers

IP     H   ER  BB    K     W-L ERA  Batters

140.1   96  30   36   112   9-3, 1.92   548 — Hernandez’84

64.3   52  17   33     74   2-3, 2.38   273 — K-Rod’08

K-Rod will finish the season with less than half the number of innings that Hernandez pitched. Hernandez went out for a second inning in more than half of his appearances and his game logs for the season are dotted with appearances of three innings or more. The game has changed to make it easier for closers to rack up impressive numbers because of their limited use (and horrible numbers owing to a few lousy outings)and while I’ll argue that it’s allowed less teams to lock down more close games, the idea of a modern closer as MVP is silly.

*Who should be the MVP? Justin Morneau? That’s a much more interesting question and, like a conscientious MVP voter would admit, I haven’t looked at the numbers closely enough to draw a conclusion. After all, there’s still a week-and-a-half to go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.