TORONTO, Ont. – While we wait for the free agent dominos to begin to fall in the always-busy baseball off-season, we will be entertained this week by the announcement of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s major award winners.
The Jackie Robinson Awards for Rookie of the Year will be announced on Monday and Managers of the Year will be named Tuesday. The Cy Young Award winners will be revealed on Wednesday and baseball’s week of honouring its best will end Thursday with the Most Valuable Player awards.
Recently, prior to the unveiling of the award winners, there was an announcement of the “finalists” for the four major awards, three from each league with a shot at the big prizes.
This is a bit of a misnomer, or at the very least it’s misleading, as it can make one believe that the three finalists have an equal shot at the award. The truth is that the voting for all the awards was done no later than the day after the regular season came to a close, and the “finalists” are the players who finished in the top three in each category.
So, who will win?
I generally stay away from the prediction game, because no one can actually foresee the future (no matter how much they think they know), but there’s a greater sense of certainty in an educated guess about who is going to win a post-season award after a season is over than, say, who is going to win a particular game or series of games.
So here are my guesses as to who needs to make room on the mantel this week:
American League Manager of the Year
Mike Scioscia, LAA; Buck Showalter, BAL; Ned Yost, KC
This award is more about a team overperforming than anything else. Generally, the Manager of the Year is the guy whose team finds itself in a playoff spot when most didn’t expect the team to succeed. It’s about a team exceeding expectations, which just adds to the myth of manager as magical genius.
With the Baltimore Orioles having run away with the AL East and people seemingly falling all over themselves to heap praise on Showalter’s incredible managing, this award should go to the man born William Nathaniel Showalter. It will be his third. If it goes to Kansas City’s Ned Yost, well, then it went to a manager who gave Jayson Nix more at-bats off the bench on the road in the World Series than Billy Butler.
National League Manager of the Year
Bruce Bochy, SF; Clint Hurdle, PIT; Matt Williams, WAS
This might be the most difficult of all the awards to guess.
The San Francisco Giants blew a huge early-season lead in the NL West, but managed to secure the second wild-card, playing the team that won the first wild-card, the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had erased a decades-long playoff drought the year before. The Washington Nationals won the East in Williams’ rookie season as a skipper – they missed the playoffs in 2013 despite going into that season as a division favourite.
Hurdle is the reigning NL Manager of the Year, having won in a landslide last season because of the Pirates’ success. Bochy has only won it once, in 1996, despite having a near Hall-of-Fame resume, so there’s a chance the voters would lean his way as a tip of the cap to a great career, but remember, the ballots were cast well before his Giants won the World Series for the third time in five seasons.
It’s awfully hard to ignore the fact that Washington had the best record in the National League and won its division by a greater margin than any other team in the major leagues, so I’m thinking Williams will be the winner, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Bochy gets the nod.
American League Rookie of the Year
Jose Abreu, CWS; Dellin Betances, NYY; Matt Shoemaker, LAA
This should be near-unanimous, at least. Two months into the season, there was the anticipation of a great ROY battle between two players whose rookie status is controversial – Abreu, a Cuban defector, and New York Yankees starter Masahiro Tanaka, who played professionally in Japan. That anticipation, as well at the battle itself, ended when Tanaka went down with an elbow injury in early July and missed the next 2 ½ months.
Abreu kept on keeping on, though, and wound up hitting an amazing .317/.383/.581, leading the league in slugging percentage and OPS+ (169). He was second in the AL in total bases and OPS, and his 36 home runs ranked him third. The big slugger put together an MVP-type year, and he’d be in that conversation if the Chicago White Sox had had a decent season. While Betances had an incredible year out of the Yankees’ bullpen and Shoemaker was unexpectedly terrific when pressed into action in the Los Angeles Angels’ rotation, Abreu’s star easily outshines them both.
National League Rookie of the Year
Jacob deGrom, NYM: Billy Hamilton, CIN; Kolten Wong, STL
This award appears to be a coronation, too. The New York Mets lost super-phenom Matt Harvey to Tommy John surgery in late 2013, and no one expected that deGrom would be able to take his place so easily. The shaggy-haired righty didn’t make his big league debut until May 15, so he only made 22 starts, but he posted a stellar 2.69 ERA and a 1.14 WHIP, striking out more than a batter per inning while keeping his strikeout-to-walk ratio above 3:1. DeGrom made a name for himself in August, when he and Giants’ righty Jake Peavy took twin no-hitters into the seventh inning in a game the Mets eventually won 4-2.
Hamilton played spectacular defense in centre field and was a running fool on the basepaths – his 56 steals were second only to Dee Gordon, although his 23 times caught stealing led the major leagues – but the .250/.292/.355 batting line is hardly award-worthy. Wong seems to be in there because someone had to finish third in the voting.
American League Cy Young
Felix Hernandez, SEA; Corey Kluber, CLE; Chris Sale, CWS
It looked for a while as though King Felix was going to run away from the pack to collect his second Cy, but then Corey Kluber came out of nowhere in the second half of the season and might have caught and passed Hernandez in the final week.
Felix’s season included a major league record streak of 23 consecutive starts in which he pitched at least seven innings and gave up no more than two earned runs. He wound up leading the league with a 2.14 ERA and 0.915 WHIP over a league-leading 34 starts. Hernandez allowed an incredible 6.5 hits per nine innings for an opponent’s slash line of .200/.243/.303. He got knocked all over the yard by the Blue Jays in his penultimate start of the season, a sound thrashing that included Dalton Pompey’s first big-league home run, and would have lost the ERA title if not for a change in scoring that took three earned runs off his record after he came out of the game.
Kluber had a strong first half, but came on like a freight train as the season wore on. The third-year righty exploded out of the all-star break with a six-start run over which he posted an ERA of 0.76 and allowed just 33 baserunners in 47 2/3 innings with 55 strikeouts. For an encore, he finished the season with a five-start run of a 1.12 ERA, 0.917 WHIP and 54 strikeouts in 40 1/3 innings. Kluber tied Hernandez’ 34 starts and led the league in both wins (18 – old school) and Pitchers’ WAR (7.4 – new school). He recorded one less out than Hernandez over the course of the season, but notched 21 more strikeouts, finishing second to David Price.
This one is a tough call – Sale had a very good year as well, of course, but this is between Hernandez and Kluber if for no other reason than the White Sox’ lefty fell more than 60 innings short of the two righties.
I think we’ve evolved past the point where win-loss record matters that much for a pitcher’s shot at the Cy Young Award, and Hernandez himself helped prove that in 2010, winning with a 13-12 mark. Unless Kluber’s 18-9 trumps Felix’s 15-6 (and I hope it doesn’t), I think another coronation is coming for The King.
National League Cy Young
Johnny Cueto, CIN; Clayton Kershaw, LA; Adam Wainwright, STL
Kershaw. Unanimously. Remember again, the ballots were cast before the great Dodgers’ lefty got lit up twice by the Cardinals in the playoffs.
Kershaw led the majors with a 1.77 ERA, a 0.857 WHIP, 197 ERA+, 7.7:1 strikeout to walk ratio, six complete games and, just for good measure, 21 wins against only three losses. Despite missing the entire month of April and therefore only making 27 starts, Kershaw finished third in the National League with 239 strikeouts.
And he threw a 15-strikeout no-hitter in which he didn’t walk a single batter, one of the greatest games ever pitched.
It’s nice that Cueto and Wainwright get mentioned in the same sentence as Kershaw. Something they can tell their grandchildren.
American League Most Valuable Player
Michael Brantley, CLE; Victor Martinez, DET; Mike Trout, LAA
There is a pretty convincing argument to be made that this should be Trout’s third straight MVP. Instead, thanks to Miguel Cabrera’s 2012 Triple Crown and subsequent huge 2013, it will be his first. Widely regarded as the best player in the game, Trout had the worst full season of his career in 2014, and it will still have been good enough to take the trophy. He hit .287/.377/.561 for a .939 OPS that ranked third in the league, the same ranking as his 36 homers. His 84 extra-base hits led the majors, as did his 338 total bases and 115 runs scored. The 23-year-old led the A.L. in RBIs (and strikeouts), stole 16 bases in 18 attempts and played a tremendous centrefield.
Martinez was an offensive machine for Detroit, hitting .335/.409/.565, leading the majors in OPS and the AL in on-base percentage. His 32 home runs were a career high (at age 35!), but he lent almost no defensive value at all, acting as the designated hitter in 115 games and playing a below-average first base in 35 others. Brantley had a breakout year in Cleveland; the Indians’ “Dr. Smooth” hitting .327/.385/.506 with 20 homers, stealing 23 bases while only getting caught once. Trout comes out on top, though, for what’s likely to be the first of many times.
National League Most Valuable Player
Clayton Kershaw, LA; Andrew McCutchen, PIT; Giancarlo Stanton, MIA
This one really comes down to philosophy – should a starting pitcher win the MVP? After all, pitchers have their own award, and Kershaw is going to win that one very easily.
In my opinion, pitchers do deserve to be eligible to win the MVP, but generally only in a season in which they’re especially dominant and no offensive player is. I’ve illustrated above just how great Kershaw’s regular season was. The question is, was it good enough – and over just 27 starts and fewer than 200 innings pitched – to knock off the reigning Most Valuable Player, who went out and had a better year than he had when he won the award in 2013? I don’t think it was, but I’m not sure that will matter.
Take Stanton out of the conversation. The slugger had a tremendous season, leading the league with 37 homers despite missing the last three weeks of September after a scary incident in which he took a fastball off the face. The 24 year-old hit .288/.395/.555 and is awesome, but his Marlins finished 11 games out of a playoff spot. In MVP discussions, that’s meaningful. Whether it deserves to be is a separate issue.
McCutchen won the MVP in 2013, helping the Pirates to a wild-card berth by hitting .317/.404/.508 with 21 home runs and 296 total bases, playing a fantastic centrefield. In 2014, McCutchen helped the Pirates to a wild-card berth by hitting .314/.410/.542 with 25 home runs and 297 total bases, playing a fantastic centrefield. He had an MVP season – winning the award with 28 of a possible 30 first-place votes – and then improved upon it. McCutchen deserves to be in that rarified air of back-to-back Most Valuable Player award winners.
I don’t think he will be, though. One gets a sense about things over the course of a year. Narratives build, one of which was that Kershaw was having a season for the ages. People were talking about him taking the Cy Young and the MVP, as Justin Verlander did in 2011, and that talk got louder and louder as the season went along. If I had a vote, it would go to McCutchen, but I think Kershaw winds up with two trophies this week.