A-Rod or Papi, what say you?

[donbarzini]

I feel that Ortiz was snubbed because his manager took advantage of the rules and would not play him in the field. As a result the Golden Boy wins again. You can always count on A-Rod to hit you a home run when you're already up by 4. But where is he after the 7th inning? Ortiz after the 7th was hitting almost .400.

If they(the writers) insist on voting this way, then the name of the award should be changed from "....Valuable...." to "...Outstanding..." . IMO the test is this: Take each player away from their respective teams and see how well they would do. Which team would have done better: The Yankees without the 26 million dollar man or the Red Sox without Papi?

 

[AK-74me]

Look I hate the Yankees as much as anyone, but you can't blame A-rod for Ortiz not playing the field. Hitting is only half the game and that was all the Ortiz's participated in. A-rod was the 2nd best fielding 3 rd baseman in the league. Ortiz was DH'ing becasue he is not good in the field, atleast not good enough to start on defense. If the award was given to Ortiz it would of been a huge snup.

A DH will never win the award unless his numbers are so much better than his competition that the fielding part does not even matter, and that is the way it should be.

As far as MVP vs. Most Outstanding Player..... well that is argued every year. It is about stats or atleast 95% of it is. I would say if it was close and the other player had more timely hits, big plays or their team won alot more than that would be the deciding factor.

 

[donbarzini]

I understand what you're saying and for the most part I agree. But it really frosts me that the sports writers anoint this putz and use the non-fielding argument to defend their position. This is the same group of buffet-raiders that voted Juan Gonzalez an MVP award when he couldn't catch VD in a whorehouse. And voted Raffy("I never, ever....ummmmm)Palmeiro a friggin gold-glove award in '99 when he played twenty-effin-eight games at 1st and played the rest as a (GASP!!)DH!!!! What the HELL are these guys smokin? One of the morons even gave Vlad a 1st place vote when he missed a month of the season and disappeared after Mid-September.

They need to make the votes public. Start some kind of reality-panel show with say the top 10 players and week by week eliminate one with each voter revealing his/her vote and the reason why. Then we get to see what dipshirts they really are!!!

 

[Larry Gude]

Here, here...

A DH will never win the award unless his numbers are so much better than his competition that the fielding part does not even matter, and that is the way it should be.

And there is NO WAY a DH will ever hit enough to take away from the fact that he sits on his azz most of the game.

Even if he hits .400 for the season and goes deep for 50 that's only gonna be perhaps .100-.150 better and maybe 20-25 dingers.

Well...let me think about this. Hitting .400 is around 60+ extra hits over the season.

I guess a case could be made.

 

[Otter]

A great column by Ian O'Connor and good article in the USA Today. The article goes into all the newspapers pulling their writers from the BCS and voting on post-season awards in all sports due to 'supposed' conflicts of interest. My feelings are that every sportswriter is all about sports to begin with, and in 95% of the cases will vote faithfully in a poll or end of year award vote.

BBWAA secretary Jack O'Connell pretty much says it best when it comes to homerism and favoritism.."All you have to know is, Barry Bonds, who hates our guts, has won 7 MVPs."

On the DH vs everydayplayer issue, I think a DH award should be awarded. DHs should not be eligble for MVP..Wish the DH rule would be rescinded.