It’s award season in baseball and that means another round of skeptics responding to the awards by telling the rest of us that the voters don’t know what they’re talking about. You can read some of those comments on Joe C’s blog item that announced Joe Mauer as the winner of the AL Gold Glove award for catchers.

The Gold Gloves are voted on by managers, who can’t vote for their own players and long have been criticized for rewarding the same players year after year. It was hard for some Twins fans to remember Torii Hunter as a Gold Glover in 2006 after his ill-advised playoff dive and harder, maybe, to see him win his eighth straight this season with the Angels. Our frame of reference for this one was a catch he didn’t make against the Twins late in the season and some poor play in the postseason.

At the same time,  I don’t exactly see Gardy and Jim Leyland poring over stats and having the internal debate over which version of zone rating to use in filling out their ballots. “That effin’ Ichiro always kills us, dammit.”

The other major postseason awards — MVP, Cy Young, Rookie and Manager of the Year — are meaningless to some because they are voted on by baseball writers who clearly have no idea what they’re talking and writing and blogging about. That’s despite the fact that most of them watch more baseball than any three of us combined — and have access to learned opinions, both inside and outside the game, in making their choices.

The same goes for Hall of Fame voting, with the added wrinkle of the now-elaborate committee structure and process for getting “veterans” into the Hall of Fame. Don’t ask me to cite chapter and verse of this ever-changing process. Instead, go here.

And, of course, the All-Star Game voting is without merit because fans have such a big say in the process, complete with the Chicago-style voting that encourages people to vote 25 times (then delete the cookies on their PC and vote some more) . And the mockery continues with the recently added fan voting for the final spot on the team, right?

This whole award thing is an area where I’d simply advise that people chill and understand that the whole operation is set up for the fans’ benefit.

Yes, some of the decisions and decision-makers are flawed. Later this month, you won’t be able to see Justin Morneau’s MVP vote total without thinking about the September slump that should knock him out of the running. And come the winter, we’ll wonder if the writers will finally get religion and induct Bert into the Hall of Fame — and then we can ask what took ‘em all so long. And we can debate whether Carlos Pena really played a better defensive first base than Kevin Youkilis (or Morneau) to win his Glove. (Yes, Mauer was the right choice at catcher.)

There’s no such thing as a perfect process and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, we should appreciate the debate brought about by these awards — and then keep arguing with each about who should have really won ‘em.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:41 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.