Wrapping Up Awards Week

OK, so, look, I’m going to be wrong here a lot more often than I’m going to be right. I assume you already know that about me. But this week, baseball awards week, yeah, I nailed it. Eight for eight. I’ve already written that this year’s awards were fairly predictable. Still: Eight for eight!

The Rookie of the Year Awards were super-easy, I thought, barely an inconvenience.* I’m pretty sure that most hardcore baseball fans knew that Seattle’s Julio Rodriguez would win and also knew that Atlanta’s Michael Harris would win. I thought that was so predictable that I didn’t even write about it, only mentioned it on this week’s PosCast.**

*As I mentioned in the Taylor Swift post, I’ve been watching A LOT of Ryan George videos. Like a lot. Like so many that I’m now finding his trademark words are just popping up in conversation. If you don’t know Ryan’s work, I mean, you might like him too. Here’s his Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory pitch meeting. And here’s my current favorite: How they wrote classic Christmas songs.

**On the PosCast this week, Mike and I did what we consider our most important work: We put together an NBA team out of vegetables. This included a surprisingly long debate about the mobility of eggplant. You’re welcome. The Nobel Prize committee has been alerted.

Manager of the Year, I thought this was the least predictable category — I wavered on the American League pick but did eventually settle on Cleveland’s Terry Francona, who won. I knew that the Mets’ Buck Showalter would win the National League award, and he did, though that race was a bit closer than I expected.

The Cy Youngs were obvious — everybody knew that Houston’s Justin Verlander and Miami’s Sandy Alcantara would win going away, and they both won unanimously.

And finally, on Thursday, the MVP awards were announced and …

American League: I predicted Aaron Judge would win in a landslide and that Shohei Ohtani would finish second with “anywhere between the one first-place vote that Mike Trout got in 2018 and the six Adrián Beltré got in 2004 — probably closer to one, though.”

What happened: Aaron Judge won in a landslide, and Shohei Ohtani finished second with two first-place votes.

National League: I predicted St. Louis’ Paul Goldschmidt would win comfortably, even though he had a rough September, because the voters had basically decided to give him the award at the end of August. I wrote: “I think Goldschmidt wins with like 20 first-place votes.”

What happened: Paul Goldschmidt won comfortably, even though he had a rough September, because the voters basically decided to give him the award at the end of August. He finished with 22 first-place votes. One thing I did get wrong was I thought it would be his teammate Nolan Arenado who finished second when it was actually San Diego’s Manny Machado, who also had a terrific season.

So the two questions we are left with: