skyking162

Yeah, yeah - Bartolo Colon cheats either Mariano Rivera or Johan Santana out of a Cy Young because he lucked into 21 wins. You can read anti-Colon diatribes at either my new favorite anti-old-school blog or even at ESPN.com, believe it or not.

I agree that Colon didn’t deserve the award (I’d pick Johan), but my complaint is along a slightly different vein. Instead of challening the answer to the Cy Young question, I want to challenge the question itself. Because if you define the Cy Young as “the highest quality pitcher who was credited with winning a lot of games for a team that needed his wins,” then Colon is the answer. And if you define the MVP as “the player who contributed the most wins to a team that needed them to make the playoffs,” then Pujols is your pick.

But that’s like asking “which Saved By the Bell character was best acted?” Or asking “Would you rather have ketchup or mustard on your spam sandwich?” I don’t care. What I care about is who was the best pitcher and which player did the most to help his team win. Period. End of question. No conditions.

Obviously there are many people, perhaps a majority, who interpret the question in this meaningful way, but the rest of the morons ruin it for us sane folk. Should Colon even be proud to win an award with such a convoluted, ridiculous set of criteria? It’s gotten to the point where I’m mildly interested who wins post-season awards, but I no longer care enough to get worked up over the this year’s bad beat.

Addendum: Rotoworld.com points out that the Twins actually won more games that Johan Santana started than the Angels won when Bartolo Colon started. Puts a different spin on the whole helping your team win thing, huh?

Popularity: 3% [?]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.