Earlier this morning Peyton Manning was awarded the NFL MVP Award for the fourth time in his career. While I am happy for Peyton and still consider him the best quarterback in the league and top five of all time, I don’t feel that he was the most deserving player. In fact, I don’t think that any of the four players receiving votes were deserving of the award. Manning, Drew Brees, Phillip Rivers, and Brett Favre all had great season, but Chris Johnson put up numbers that will be remembered for a long time. Johnson became only the 6th player in the history of the NFL to rush for over 2,000 yards. His 2,006 yards should have been more than enough to earn the award. Unfortunately, sports writers don’t think about stuff like that. Johnson’s team, the Tennessee Titans failed to make the playoffs this year despite Johnson’s dominant performance. Holding that against the running back, the writers did not give him a single first place vote for the MVP award. In my opinion, that just isn’t right. BrettFarve, who was not even as good as his replacement in Green Bay, Aaron Rodgers , received at least one first place vote…just for being Brett Favre. So I would like to apologize to Johnson for the mishaps of the writers and award him this year’s “I Should Have Been MVP But Got Screwed By The Writers” Award. Congrats Chris.
The Chris Johnson instance isn’t the only thing that the Sports Writers have screwed up recently. Two other cases come to mind. The first being the 2009 National League Cy Young Award and the second the 2010 National Baseball Hall of Fame voting.
In 2009 the National League had a closer race than the American League for the Cy Young award. Zack Grienkewas a no brainer in the AL. In the NL, it was a three-man race between former winners Chris Carpenter and Tim Lincecum and newbie Adam Wainwright. Lincecum led the three in Strikeouts but had the fewest wins of any of the pitchers. Carpenter had the lowest earned run average and the second most wins, but was limited to fewer than 200 innings due to an early injury that kept him in the dugout for a month or so. Adam Wainwright however, posted the most consistent numbers of any of the pitchers. Waino finished the season with a record of 19-8 with a 2.63 era, 212 strikeouts, and lead the league with 233 innings pitched. The most impressive part ofWainwright’s season though was the 26 starts in which he gave up 2 of fewer earned runs. Any true fan of baseball knows that Tim Lincecum was not the most deserving pitcher. Congrats to Adam Wainwright for being the best pitcher in the MLB.
Not even a week before Chris Johnson was snubbed of even a single first place vote, Roberto Alomar and Edgar Martinez were kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Alomar, who is arguably the best second baseman to play the game since Joe Morgan has never been a favorite of sports writers. It must have been the famous incident in which Alomar spit in the face of an umpire that kept him out, because anyone who looks at his career numbers knows that he should have been a first ballot guy. If his 2724 career hits or lifetime .300 batting average aren’t enough, the fact that his 10 Gold Glove awards are more than any other second baseman should be. As for Edgar Martinez, the case against him is obvious, he never played a defensive position in the major leagues. However, he does play a position. He is the Designated Hitter which was adopted as an official position by Major League Baseball in 1973. Since its inception, no person has been better at the position than Edgar Martinez. One of the most important stats in the game is On-Base Percentage, Martinez finished in the top ten 11 times in that category. His lifetime OBP of .418 ranks 22nd of all time. That means that out of every baseball player ever, Martinez was the 22nd best at getting on base. That is an unbelievable stat and that the Baseball Writers of America Association overlooked such an amazing feat is beyond me.
I have a solution though…..
Split the votes into three different parts, allowing the Writers, the Players, and of course the fans to vote. The writers votes would be worth 45% because they are the ones with the most in-depth statistics and while it might not seem like it at times, they do know what they are talking about the majority of the time. However, writers are known for holding grudges against players for giving a bad interview or something along those lines and then don’t give them full credit for their achievements. The Players would also get 45% of the vote because lets face it, if there is anyone who knows how amazing Chris Johnson’s 2,006 rushing yards are, it is one of the other 90 or so running backs that carried the ball in 2009. Finally, the last ten percent of the vote goes to the fans. There is no doubt that the fan voting part of this vote would be skewed, but that is why it is such a small part, however, if the fans got to vote for the Hall of Fame, Roberto Alomar would be in and it would give writers an idea of where the fans stand on letting steroid users into the Hall of Fame. I believe we could fix a lot of errors with this new system, but then again, what do I know….I’m just a pissed off fan.
