Walkoff Walk

Joe Mauer, whose last name means "wall" in German, has finally gotten his long-overdue AL MVP award, winning 27 of the 28 first place votes. He beat out such illustrious contenders as Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira of the Yankees, and also Miguel Cabrera who received the other first place vote, bizarrely. With the big win, Mauer takes home a tidy $100,000 bonus

Mauer won his third batting title in the past four seasons and also led the AL in OBP and SLG, both for the first time. His 1.031 OPS made him the only AL hitter to top the 1.000 mark and his 307 total bases placed him a solid seventh in the league; not bad for a dude who missed the first month of the season.

He's also sitting on a streak of two straight All Star Game starts and two straight Gold Gloves, and his face was seen in the back pants pocket of many a Minnesota State Fair attendee this past summer. The three most common things you could find on a stick at the fair: pork chops, walleye, and a cutout of Joe Mauer's dreamy face.

The Twins catcher has long been tops of the pops but was denied the honor back in 2006, when his less-deserving teammate Justin Morneau RBI'd and first-based his way to an ill-deserved award. Mauer out-walked, out-OPS'ed and out-hit his teammate in aught-six, but the massive gap in simple RBI fooled the starry-eyed BBWAA into overwhelmingly supporting Morneau.

But in 2009, Morneau went down late with an injury and it was Joe Mauer (with some help from Mike Cuddyer and Jason Kubel) who led the Twins to a surprise AL Central title, thus proving that you don't need a boring power-hitting first baseman to win the whole bag of donuts.

Joe Mauer is everything a general manager wants out of a baseball player: fields a tough position well, hits for average, hits for power, uses his keen eye to draw walks and avoid strikeouts, and grows sideburns well enough to set the hearts of a hundred thousand Minnesota girls a-flutter.

Shame he'll be a Yankee next year, amirite?

(photo courtesy of jakemohan)

I suppose I could keep trotting out examples of people who grossly misunderstand the value of certain statistics when it comes to picking out a Cy Young award winner... so I will. This time it's Jeff Fletcher over at Fanhouse who penned this tome about why Chris Carpenter, not Tim Lincecum deserved the NL Cy Young.

(SIGHS)

Flecther actually brings up some nice advanced statistics (namely FIP) and more than adequately incorporates them into his argument. However, like our friend Jack McDowell from yesterday, Fletcher takes umbrage at the fact that Tim Lincecum was a strikeout pitcher. Heavens to betsy! Why are pitchers who make outs on their own suddenly so undesirable?

Lincecum is a power pitcher. He struck guys out. Carpenter is not. He let guys put the ball in play and his defense got the outs.

If I'm trying to project the future of both pitchers, or if I'm trying to decide which guy I'd like on my team for 2010 or beyond (ignoring their age, in this case), I'll take the guy with the strikeouts. Strikeouts are nice and clean and don't require any help from the defense.

But if I'm filling out a 2009 Cy Young ballot, I don't care about 2010 or projections. I care about what actually happened. What actually happened was that Carpenter got outs at a better rate than Lincecum. Just that more of them were boring grounders to the shortstop instead of big exciting punchouts. You can say that strikeouts are better than groundouts because you can't move a runner or score a run on a strikeout, but Carpenter still did a better job preventing runs, so it didn't matter.

Is it really fair to penalize a pitcher who did his job (got outs, prevented runs) because he didn't do it a certain way (with strikeouts)?

Our resident Fanhouse writer finds two categories, ERA and WHIP, that Carpenter bests Lincecum in and then uses this to suppose that Carpenter is a better run preventer. Am I the only one who sees the inherent flaw in the argument? I shouldn't be, because he pretty much states all the reasons he is wrong himself. That's some bold writing tactics.

Fletcher says that Carpenter makes a great deal more outs on balls in play and then says that because of the ERA and WHIP (two things that are partly based on the conversion into outs of these very same balls in play) Carp is better at run prevention than the actual winner of the award. Umm, no, that simply means, as Fletcher points out, that Carpenter relied more on his defense than Lincecum to make the outs that give his numbers a fantastic shine. If I'm looking to award the best pitcher, then how can I pick the guy who admittedly needed a lot more help to put up strong numbers?

If we really wanted a nice pair of statistics to talk about run prevention, then maybe we should be talking a bit more about RAR and WAR. Oh, would you look at that, Lincecum's RAR (71.8) and WAR (8.2) in 2009 were substantially higher than Carpenter's postings (50.2 and 5.6, respectively) in those same categories...

Hoo boy, it isn't too obvious I have a mancrush on Lincecum is it?

This photo was screen-grabbed from the MLB front page on Yahoo! yesterday. Muh muh muh Mike Scioscia face this is certainly not, but it's still funny because John Lackey is horrendously ugly, you see.

McDowell, who is now a "blogger" and "covering" the White Sox at a Chicago media outlet, is actually a winner of the Cy Young himself. He did so while winning an impressive 22 games for the team he now blogs about. Great! Surely this makes him an expert on the subject, and he will be able to provide wise insight on the winds of change that led the normally asinine writers to go a sterling two for two in picking the Cy Young winners in 2009! Or not.

It's not a very long post by any stretch, I'd just like to highlight a few snippets of wonderful ineptitude:

The slippery slope we must watch out for is starting to de-emphasize wins vs "stuff." Obviously both Cy winners would have benefitted and probably pushed their win totals into the 20's with more offensively productive teams behind them.

So when you mention pitchers who had their win totals bloated by superior offensive teams behind them, you're quite clearly referencing yourself the year you won, right? That's the year your White Sox teammates gave you nearly 5 runs per game, a number that would make the adorable Tim Lincecum blush with envy. OK, good, just checking. Tally ho!

But we'd better make sure the Javier Vasquez scenario doesn't overtake the voters in the future. Now that they have officially allowed full season 15 game winners to represent the best in the game, you start to worry about perennial low ERA, high strikeout guys like Vasquez being propelled to the highest level of respect...when they shouldn't. What is the difference how many strikeouts a guy has if they can't ultimately win games?

"Javier Vasquez" (SIC) had a really, really good year. He performed on every statistical level for the Braves in 2009, and did so in truly impressive fashion. Quick show of pale, Internet-reading hands though, if you were the GM of a baseball team granted total omniscience and the ability to see the future, and you had the chance to acquire a player who you knew was guaranteed to put up the exact same numbers Vazquez did in 2009, would you take him?

Obviously I am not surprised that McDowell is against advanced metrics, or at the very least fails to acknowledge most of them existing. However, the fact that McDowell says Javier's performance doesn't merit "respect" when in reality it was truly awesome by even the most basic of measurements is absurd. He won 15 games! That total put him in an easy tie for fourth place overall in the rankings of that category in 2009. You know who else was in that fourth place spot? Oh, just the actual NL Cy Young winner. Clearly, he deserves no respect for that.

Moreover, why is McDowell picking on Vazquez specifically? He says when he starts the post that he is comfortable with the results of both awards and in a moment of grand irony even goes so far to say that "you can't complain about either choice" before ripping into the very nature of Javier Vazquez' being. In expressing his dislike of Vazquez' having a low ERA and high strikeout total but without gaudy win numbers, McDowell may as well have been talking about Tim Lincecum directly. But I guess since Tim Lincecum was never a pitcher with a middling win total on the White Sox the way Vazquez was, he gets a free pass from McDowell's direct commentary... Ohh!

I really don't have anything else to add to this. This pour soul has a case of Win Fever the likes of which I have never seen. We need to get him some help! The next stage of the illness will involve "Black Jack" howling at the moon on 35th Street and begging for a few more wins from the cosmos.

Or maybe I'm just overreacting. Maybe McDowell has a point, and I'm just writing this out of some deeply ingrained hatred for one silly little double he surrendered to Edgar Martinez in days of yore...

I'm glad that someone (a) took the time to re-voice this Tim Lincecum video game ad after his pot bust and (b) made it funny and just a tiny bit NSFW. Please to enjoy.

(Thanks to Hot Clicks and Chris Mottram)

There are days when you find yourself lying on a Pacific Ocean Beach letting the waves sing you to sleep. There are days when you're surrounded by friends, family and multitudes of other loved ones, and the affection warms you like a fleece blanket. There are other days when some crazy bastard is going to swing at you with a baseball bat.

In those first two instances you should savor each moment to the fullest. In the third scenario, you should duck.

On to this week's non-fatal/non-critical bat attacks!

• Our first story takes place outside Seattle's famous Pike Place Fish Market. You know it as the place where the employees throw salmon at each other mere blocks from where that one real world guy slapped that one real world dame with the fro. So obvs the place is no stranger to violence, but don't you think if someone was gonna get their bell rung it'd get rung it'd be with a fish? No dice. This week a guy got chopped back to the mound. But did he roll over and play dead like Irene did? No way, "After being hit with the bat, one suspect tried to steal his cell phone, but the man kicked the robber in the face." Solid.


• Nothing can come between two men like a financial dispute. Money is the crowbar that tears people from each other. Whether the amount be $50 or even $100, consequences can be serious. So imagine when the amount is $27,000 and you don't wanna pay it back. That's when you get driven deep to cheap seats by a fellow member of the Bridgeport, CT hispanic community. But take comfort in the fact that the news item will take no interest in why there was a $27,000 personal loan at stake.


• A miracle was averted when Richie Sambora discovered two fans on his roof weren't burglars and decided not to kill them. Tragedy struck when he returned to bed and no one had fallen off the roof. MAKE THE VIDEO ROB.


• And finally, it's time to dispense with the humour. It's time to get to down to business. You may notice the gratuitous use of the letter u when I just spelled humor. Well that's because Graeme Lloyd's Heathen Foot Soldiers have struck again Down Under. And as if that wasn't bad enough, it looks like they're hooked on bathtub speed. Two kids in Brisbane, one armed with a bat and one armed with A SWORD, have been holding up pharmacies and stealing the Sudafed. I got my eye on you, Dave Nilsson Jr.

Former MLB star reliever and emo kid Eric Gagne, who spent the summer leading the Quebec Capitales to the Can-Am League title with his 6-6 record and 4.65 ERA, wants to let you know that he'd like to bring baseball back in Montreal despite his lack of business prowess.

At a charity event in Quebec City, Gagne was asked if he would lead an investment team to help Montreal get a professional baseball team. His response:

His response, translated from his native French-Canadian tongue:

"I know baseball but I'm not a businessman and there are other things involved that I don't want to deal with. I know how to lead a good team. I know there's a lot of people and potential in Montreal but can't say much more than that. I'd need to know more about the business side of things...but yes I would be interested."

Ask folks in Boston if Eric Gagne "knows baseball" and "knows how to lead a good team" and you'll get a wildly different reaction than Gagne's own opinion.

San Francisco Giants starter Tim Lincecum has won his second straight Cy Young Award and can now lend one to his video game doppelganger. Lincecum struck out a whopping 261 hitters over 32 starts that included four complete games and two shutouts. His 15 wins were a low total, indeed, but the sorry San Fran offense supported him to a tune of 2.38 runs per game in each of the twelve Giants losses he started.

Oh, and his FIP was just 0.01 higher than Zack Greinke's and nearly half a run better than anyone else in the NL. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Not you, Tim.

Cardinals starter Chris Carpenter, who was the only gentleman to post a lower ERA than Lincecum in the National League, finished second, mostly because his time missed due to injury prevented him from matching Lincecum's innings and strikeout totals. His teammate Adam Wainwright finished third.

In a bizarre twist, Lincecum didn't even receive the most first place votes, but won the award because more folks thought Wainwright deserved third place than second. Also, Carpenter was left off of two ballots in favor of Javy Vazquez and Danny Haren; had he made those ballots, Carp would have won come a bit closer.

I think Lincecum is one of the few players in baseball that the entire staff at Walkoff Walk admires. He's talented, he's quirky, he's charming, and he's uglier than half of us. Congrats, Mr. Lincecum! Have a hot dog with us!

All over the world, people go to sleep hungry. Even in the United States of America and it's little Northern sister Canada, there are an alarming number of needy folks who don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labors on a regular basis. In these hard times, an alarming 15% of Americans are struggling to put food on the table while numbers are similarly skyrocketing in Canada.

Here in the US, Thanksgiving is just a week away and the terrifically terrifying Black Friday trails close behind. Maybe instead of spending insane dollars on crap we don't need we can direct those funds towards a good cause. Just like we did last year, we're going to persuade you to (read: guilt you into) donating cash or food to your local food banks or, even better, volunteering at your local soup kitchen.

Food banks operate year-round, not just during the holidays, and are constantly in need of volunteers and donations. Things have not been easy with companies and individuals cutting back on their charity AND more and more people showing up hungry on a daily basis. So please, do what you can and ignore that nonsense from the MLB marketing department. You DON'T need a Cleveland Indians themed Rubiks Cube as much as your neighbor needs a bowl of soup and some bread.

But hey, some of us are busy bees buzzing around the hive and we don't have time to volunteer. Lucky for you, these places take credit card donations over the Internet. Once again, here's a nearly complete list of food banks in MLB cities. Pick your favorite.

• Anaheim - Second Harvest of Orange County
• Arlington - North Texas Food Bank
• Atlanta - Atlanta Community Food Bank
• Baltimore - Maryland Food Bank
• Boston - Greater Boston Food Bank
• Chicago - Greater Chicago Food Bank
• Cincinnati - Freestore Foodbank
• Cleveland - Cleveland Foodbank
• Denver - Food Bank of the Rockies
• Detroit - Gleaners Community Food Bank
• Houston - Houston Food Bank
• Kansas City - Harvesters
• Los Angeles - Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
• Miami - Daily Bread
• Milwaukee - Hunger Task Force
• Minneapolis - Second Harvest Heartland
• New York - Food Bank for New York City
• Oakland - Alameda County Community Food Bank
• Philadelphia - PhilAbundance
• Phoenix - St. Mary's Food Bank Alliance
• Pittsburgh - Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank
• San Diego - San Diego Food Bank
• San Francisco - San Francisco Food Bank
• Seattle - Northwest Harvest
• St. Louis - St. Louis Area Food Bank
• Tampa - America's Second Harvest of Tampa Bay
• Toronto - Daily Bread
• Washington - Capital Area Food Bank

If your city or town isn't represented here, head on over to Feeding America. Thanks for reading; let's hope that by the time we all sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, there are millions of folks who can take their names off the list of the hungry.

(Photo courtesy of Mr. Kris at Flickr)

Mike Scioscia, who led his Los Angeles Angels of Angelheim to a tidy division title despite the untimely loss of one of his employees, won the AL Manager of the Year award. Jim Tracy, who led his Colorado Rockies to a tidy Wild Card spot despite the untimely mishandling of the team by his predecessor Clint Hurdle, took the NL Manager of the Year award.

Ron Gardenhire finished second in the AL despite "doing so much with so little". You hear that, Joe Mauer? You're inconsequential to the success of your squadron! Some old fart did all the heavy lifting!

The Manager of the Year award is the least analytical of any post-season award doled out by the BBWAA, which is why I cannot allow myself to critique their choices. Go ahead! Reward some middle-aged greaseballs for screwing up the least. Managerial moves aren't strategically that important to the outcome of a game anyway.