2011 MLB Horse Collar Awards
The 2011 season was just your average year for a long time. Actually, it seemed even duller than your average year at times. Then maybe the wildest September I’ve ever seen turned things upside down. That was followed by perhaps the greatest postseason of the LDS era. There were individual performances which will also standout about this season. In short, a season that for most of the year seemed destined to be forgotten or even remembered for the wrong reasons, I now fear will be recalled often and remembered always. I say that I fear this because as a Braves fan I know that I’m going to be reminded of my team’s collapse many, many times in the years to come.
About this Year’s Awards
In many ways, these awards are very similar to last season. For a brief refresher, I look mainly at regular season results independent of team success. I use team success and postseason numbers as tie-breakers when it’s really close. I might also use “clutch” stats for a tie-breaker. I am doing defensive awards again this season but I also take defense into account for every award.
There are some changes in format this season and there are a bunch of new awards. Unfortunately, almost all of this is repetitive and serves only to increase uniformity. My awards are more specialized this season. One reason for this is that it became clear this fall that people were not done looking at relievers as possible Cy Young’s and looking at pitchers as possible MVP’s.
I was trying to clear things. However, there may be some times where a clarification by way of yet another award will seem pointless and make things appear cluttered, but I really had no choice in the matter. By the time I realized what was going on the OCD part of my brain wasn’t going to give up.
Once again I have some just for fun awards towards the end of the blog. I greatly expanded the Biggest Douche of the Year Award section. That was one of the more fun parts of this whole process. I’ve also added titles to every award.
The Making of The 2011 MLB Horse Collar Awards
Speaking of the process, it was a task once again this year, although for different reasons I think than last year. Last season I recall feeling like each award was such a tough decision. There were certainly some tough choices this year, particularly for awards in which there were a bunch of valid candidates, but it wasn’t as hard as last year in that regard. For me, the hardest part this year was just finding the time and the energy to complete the awards without doing it half-assed.
In addition, I will say the process of doing these awards on the whole was more difficult at first this year, and the thing slowing me up was the problem of deciding which stats to use and which ones to ignore. There are so many stats available now and I had to figure out what stats I thought were most important or else I would never finish. If I sat and compared every stat of the top 5 guys in each category it would be time consuming, confusing, and would result in a substandard edition.
Even with the narrowing down of stats and even when I had time and energy there was another problem. I have some peculiar habits when it comes to writing and doing projects for this blog. Something that used to happen quite often actually was that I would have an idea for something, I would start researching, I might even start doing the blog, but eventually I would realize that I had bitten off way more than I had intended to.
At some point while creating this awards blog I realized that my OCD had hijacked the thing. It just kept getting bigger. I would come home from work and spend literally 7 hours in front of the computer trying to get it done with so I could move on to the next thing. All of the sudden I would look up and it was an hour before work and I wasn’t done. Not only that, I would realize that at the pace I was going at, I wasn’t going to be done that night either. The process would just start over and I’d have still have a lot left to do.
If there was someone who for some strange reason kept up with this blog during the 4 or 5 years since I’ve been doing it, they might by this time look at me almost like a manic/depressive or something. There are times when I’m forced to just put my rankings or picks up without any analysis or comments at all. Then the next week I spend hours upon hours writing some 98 page tome that the imaginary reader might be overwhelmed by.
I sometimes wonder myself, why this happens. I wonder why many of my blogs—even when somewhat structured—end up turning into a repetitive regurgitating of data that is distracting, probably boring for some, and might just turn someone away immediately. I think the biggest reason is that I like to use stats to defend my stance on this or that issue. There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s actually a great (and in my opinion the best) way to support your argument.
The problem is that something about the way I’m wired or my genes or something makes me have a tendency to designate too many stats. Once I use certain stat categories for a few things, it’s very difficult for me to not use each and every one of the stats on each and every case. It’s overkill and superfluous but I don’t have much control over it.
And yet it’s not just some annoying defect in my wiring that causes me to write the way I do. I actually find the numbers to be interesting. I have no use for a write up that focuses on anecdotal things and on quotes. I don’t have any quotes but even if I did I don’t think I’d include them because I think they’re boring.
So, if anyone does read this, I hope you will try to push through some of the monotonous stuff. That’s the frustrating thing. Often times when I’m off on a tangent or have stumbled onto a topic that is actually interesting, I really like what I’ve written. The problem is that it’s usually born lost in a sea of other stuff. If the best stuff is on page 76 of 200, it’s unlikely anyone checking a random blog is ever going to find it.
Anyway, this awards blog turned into a monster. It kept me unable to focus on any of the other blogs. It took up all my free time and left me with little time to sleep. And it just kept getting bigger. Eventually I realized that it would be best to split it up into several blogs, beginning with this one. If you’re wondering how it could possibly take me literally weeks to finish something like this, consider that I have just written 3 pages or so about the condition that leads me to go overboard.
By the way, there are a ton of stats used in this awards entry, and that means there are a ton of abbreviations and acronyms. Explaining them all would mean making this post even larger, so I decided to assume that most (imaginary) readers will be versed enough in SABR-talk to muddle through.
Finally, because this thing turned out to be so extensive there’s a decent chance that I’ve left in a misspelling or typo (above and beyond the usual grammatical mistakes). For this I apologize. Please remember, I do not have an editor.
Now, on with it (oh, uh, see Parts II, III, IV, etc.).
No comments:
Post a Comment