SB Nation’s 2013 MLB awards

Each year, SB Nation polls its network of team bloggers in a referendum on the major league season that mirrors that of the Baseball Writers Association of America. But with one difference: ours is unfettered by any of the pretensions that warp the ballots of the columnists and beat writers who vote on those “real” awards. SB Nation’s informed outsiders have no illusions that they are acting as guardians of the game and redactors of its history. Rather, they have a much higher standard to answer to: The choices each of them makes will be scrutinized by a community that lives and dies with its chosen team in a way that makes terms like “loyalty” and “devotion” seem painfully inadequate and occasionally challenges accepted notions of good mental health. In other words, they can’t afford to appear to be poseurs, parvenus, dilettantes. The threat of judgment and ridicule enforces a thoroughgoing integrity that would wither the average American statesman.

What follows is the results of our annual poll in three categories: Best Player, Best Pitcher and Best Rookie in each league. In some cases our results will anticipate those of the BBWAA, while in others we will likely diverge from them. In either case, the voters are prepared to defend their decisions with the tenacity of bulldogs. Living day to day in the arena, they know it’s what’s expected of them — and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

For the last two seasons, one of the game’s dominant controversies has been whether Mike Trout (all-around excellent player) is more valuable than Miguel Cabrera (ultimate stationary masher). It wasn’t much of a conflict for our voters, who gave Trout a Nixon-McGovern-style landslide. Note also the strong showing by Oakland A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson, a strong threat on both offense and defense this year who was neglected by the establishment for both the All-Star Game bench and the Gold Glove awards.

The voting for NL Best Player presented no problems for our panel; they came close to unanimity when it came to making the final choice. A year ago, Andrew McCutchen parlayed a torrid midseason stretch into MVP consideration, but the Pirates’ second-half fade, a slide mirrored in McCutchen’s production, knocked him down to third place. This year the Pirates hung on and made the postseason for the first time since the Bonds-Bonilla-Drabek days and the center fielder was a big reason why, hitting .339/.441/.561 in the second half. Clayton Kershaw, whose extraordinary 1.83 ERA (his third straight ERA title) figures to snatch some first-place votes from the position players in the BBWAA balloting, barely registers here. Note the fifth-place showing for Joey Votto, whose high-OBP/low-RBI season was much derided in Cincinnati this summer. We’ll see if the professional pundits are as perceptive.

Max Scherzer takes our balloting going away, as he probably will the BBWAA voting. There were odd moments this season when an argument could have been constructed in favor of others, Yu Darvish, Chris Sale, Anibal Sanchez among them. In the end, even value metrics like WAR are no help to those that would prefer to construct a most-valuable pitcher narrative around something other than Scherzer’s league-leading 21 wins, are no help since the league leaders finished in an indistinguishable heap. In the final analysis, Scherzer was at least as good as any other pitcher on the circuit, and in this case the high win total isn’t a Bob Welch-LaMarr Hoyt-style red herring but a clue pointing to Scherzer’s mastery.

Legend has it that one elector in the 1820 presidential election purposely voted against James Monroe so that George Washington would remain the only president unanimously selected by the electoral college. We can only assume that the one voter who cast his ballot for Matt Harvey had the same sort of thing in mind where Clayton Kershaw was concerned.

At midseason there was some question as to whether the American League would produce a rookie worth voting for at the end of the year. Because of a combination of service-time manipulation and his own development at Triple-A, Wil Myers had only been up briefly. By the end of the year, the field was still weak, but the leader had clearly established himself.

The final controversial award on our ballot, Jose Fernandez of the Marlins seemed to have a lock on the award until Yasiel Puig came along in June and lit a fire under a Dodgers team that ultimately won its division. Perhaps if Puig had maintained his batting average in the .380s we might have had more of an argument, but a soft, injury-slowed September took some of the glow off of Puig’s debut, while Fernandez headed into the clubhouse with one of the best seasons by a rookie pitcher in the history of the game.