2012
MLB Horse Collar Awards
It took me awhile to
get down to the business of my MLB awards this year. When I finally got around
to the project, I realized that very little from the 2012 season stood out for
me. It was one of the more ordinary years we’ve seen in quite a while. There
just weren’t as many memorable moments and stories as there often are.
There were some
no-hitters and perfect games; some surprise teams; and a handful of impressive
individual seasons, but that’s pretty much the case every year. The final week
and weekend had drama but it was nothing like the final days of the 2011
season.
The brand new 1-game
wild card playoffs were supposed to be instant classics; dial-a-dramatic-game.
But they didn’t do much for me. Admittedly I’m a bit biased as a Braves fan,
but I think 1-game playoffs between teams with different records are always
going to seem superfluous and hokey. It is what it is: an abomination.
But once we got that
garbage over with we were treated to possibly the best LDS round of all-time.
While the outfield-fly rule had eliminated any chance of this being my favorite
postseason of all-time, I actually thought we could be headed for one of the
great postseasons of the modern era.
However, the LDS round
was followed by one of the worst ALCS in recent history. On the other side, the
NLCS went 7 games and featured the Giants coming from down 3-1 in the series.
But this year’s NLCS won’t show up on any lists of the greatest 7-game series
of all-time. Finally the 2012 season ended with a whimper, in one of the least
interesting World Series of the last decade.
So that was it. I
wonder what I’ll remember 5 years ago when I think about the 2012 season. But
the answer is pretty obvious: Outfield-fly.
About
this Year’s Awards
The structure of this
awards entry is almost exactly the same as last year. All of the categories and
titles are the same. The major difference between this year’s awards entry and
last year’s is in the comments; specifically the length of the comments about
each award. Last year I tried to give an explanation for each award choice and
things quickly got out of hand. The project turned into a monster that required
several different entries. The end result was that the commentary was thorough
but also repetitive. This year I simply couldn’t allow myself to repeat the
process. I decided that I wouldn’t attempt the “explanation” of each choice but
would instead just make a few brief comments. In the end, do to time
constraints and other factors, I realized that solution wasn’t going to work
either. So, I was forced to eliminate comments about the individual awards all
together.
The Biggest Douche of
the Year Award is the only section that contains commentary. It’s pretty hard
to leave that section on its own without some comments. I’d say the BDOTY award
is the signature piece of all of my award entries and therefore cannot be
compromised.
Other than the lack of comments
everything is basically the same as last year. If this is your first time
checking out my awards, you’ll notice that I have come up with a lot of my own
original awards which I pick along with the traditional awards. My awards are
much more specific than the mainstream awards. You’ll also notice that some of
the awards seem repetitive, but I find that this is necessary in order to be
inclusive. 9 out of 10 seasons my top 3 position players are going to be my top
3 for the MVP, but there might be 1 year when a pitcher sneaks in there, and
that’s why I like to specialize the awards.
By the way, for just
about all of the awards involving position players I consider batting, base
running, and defense. For the pitching awards that involve NL players, I don’t
pay any attention to a pitcher’s performance as an offensive player (but I did
again give an award to the top hitting pitcher this year).
While I consider things
like team success--both during the regular season and the postseason--it’s
really a minor factor and would only have an impact if players are virtually
impossible to separate using individual numbers. I also consider postseason
performance in all of the awards, but it’s definitely secondary to the overall
performance.
I should say that my
Gold(ish) Glove Awards are different from the rest of my awards in the way I
come up with my selections. I make those selections by using a combination of
the following sources: what I’ve seen with my own eyes following the game;
player reputation; the defensive metrics used by FanGraphs; and the Fielding
Bible Voting. This year I feel more confident about my defensive awards than
ever before.
Thoughts
on the Process
I know I’ve said this
several times before but it’s interesting to me that every time I do an awards
entry the process is in some way different. Occasionally the difference will be
in the stats or the way I’m looking at the stats. I would have to say that was
the case this season.
One of the interesting things
about baseball stats—and really sports stats in general--is that often times an
old idea will suddenly become a bigger part of the conversation for seemingly
no real reason. I’ll use a stat from another sport as an example.
The Passer Rating has
been around for many years. It was once fairly obscure. It wasn’t something
that fans talked about much or people covering the game mentioned very often.
It might get thrown in there every now and then. Someone might mention that
“Jerry Rice had the good fortune of playing with perhaps the greatest QB of
all-time early in his career and then later in his career with a guy who
finished with the best career passer rating in NFL history.”
You knew that meant
that Steve Young was very special but you didn’t necessarily know what exactly
the passer rating was. And then for some reason people started mentioning
rating more often and that led to people looking up exactly how passer rating
is calculated and that increase in attention led to ESPN coming up with their
own QB rating that included running and adjusted for things like down and
distance. Nowadays, people still talk TD’s, INT’s, yards, and team record, but
passer rating is mentioned at least as often.
During this baseball
season, the “breakthrough stat” was WAR. Again, this is not a new concept or
even a new statistic. For anyone who was into Sabermetrics before Moneyball or
who got interested in the subject around the time of its publication, one of
the first Saber stats encountered was WAR, and one of the easier concepts to
grasp was the idea of “Wins Above Replacement.” But WAR was just one of the
useful stats that someone might look at along with OPS or Runs Created for
hitters, K/9 or BABIP for pitchers, Range Factor and Total Zone Runs for
defense, and so on.
Suddenly this season,
WAR was everywhere. It was being mentioned on shows like Around the Horn and
talked about on Twitter by people who were not a part of the Saber world.
Somewhere along the way it seemed that people were looking at it as the
definitive stat to be used in all situations rather than just a really good
stat to be used alongside other metrics.
When I created my
awards this season I consciously guarded against using WAR as the
end-all-be-all determining factor. This might seem silly, but if you go on a
baseball website and look up individual stats you’ll notice that the WAR stat
holds a prominent position. This is a good thing because it’s a great stat, but
it’s not perfect and you should always be looking at several different metrics
when trying to determine how good a player is or which player is better or who
is the best player.
As I mentioned before,
WAR isn’t a new stat, and many people have been using it for years. The change
this season was really more psychological than anything else. It just seemed to
be focused on by people covering the game much more than ever before. On the
other hand, the area of baseball statistics that actually did change in a major way this season (at least from my
perspective) was defense.
Fielding statistics
have trailed far behind the advancements in the areas of batting and pitching.
Defense has always been difficult to measure with stats, and many of the
metrics used to try and measure fielding have been notoriously unreliable. Just
last year I wrote in this same section of the awards blog about how little
faith I had in defensive stats.
Maybe I was just
looking at the wrong stats or maybe there really have been some major advancements
since last year, but whatever the case, I was much more impressed with the
defensive numbers this year. In the past, there were so many times when a
number spit out by one of the defensive stats simply did not make any sense at
all. I found those instances to be almost non-existent this year. As I
mentioned earlier, I feel better about my defensive awards than I ever have
before. I should also add that while I have always considered baserunning and
defense when coming up with the award choices, those two areas had a bigger
impact this season because I felt like I had reliable stats to work with.
One of the interesting
things about Sabermetrics becoming mainstream and the impact that Moneyball has
had is that it all happened at a point when the game was in the midst of a
power era. The crackdown on PED’s and probably a few other things brought an
end to the power era. Some of the beliefs expressed back in the early 2000’s
(or at least, some of the ideas people came away with after reading Moneyball
or diving into Sabermetrics research) might not make quite as much sense in the
game of today. The downplaying of speed on the bases and of athleticism in the
field made sense when every game was 11-9. But now that every game is 3-2 it
doesn’t seem to make as much sense to play a guy who can hit but can’t field or
to ignore a guy with little power but great baserunning skills.
The stat community
seems to have adjusted. People continue to talk about OBP and power being keys,
but there has been much more talk recently about the value of defense and base
running.
Okay. Enough with the
introductions. Let’s get to the awards.
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