Award Talk!
Let's talk about awards. Sorry, this sub-hed didn't add anything to your life. You should unread it.
Baseball season is over, which means Baseball Award Season is here. Who will be this year’s MVPs, or Rookies of the Year, or Cys Young? Which manager will be roundly acclaimed, only to be unceremoniously fired before the end of 2025?
And, most importantly, which Giants were or were not honored and how proud/offended by omission should Giants fans be?
All of this, of course, was inspired by Logan Webb, who was named a finalist for the NL Cy Young award yesterday. Webb was an obvious candidate, what with his leading the majors in innings and anchoring a very spotty Giants rotation and being one of the best pitchers in the National League and whatnot. By fWAR, he’s right there with the other two finalists, Blake Snell and Zac Gallen, and it’s really anyone’s award at this point.
Just kidding! No, it isn’t. Snell already won it.
Well, maybe. Probably, even. Because yesterday, Jeff Passan tweeted out the lists of finalists for all of the major awards. Except they weren’t in alphabetical order. They weren’t in any easily understandable order…unless they were the order of finish for the awards.
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT: Here is the since-deleted tweet:
Because looking at that. it does correspond pretty well with the obvious placements, doesn’t it? Of course Ohtani’s going to win AL MVP, and Freeman’s going to come in third for NL MVP, and Corbin Carroll’s going to be NL Rookie of the Year. Cole, Gausman, Gray? Seems like the right order. Counsell and Schumaker 1-2? Yep, passes the Snitker test. And, of course, there’s no reason for Passan to delete the tweet if it doesn’t tell everyone the order of finish.
(One caveat: Bochy over Hyde is a surprise, though voters wanting to reward the then-3-time World Series winner who hadn’t won MOY is not a surprise. Still, if you win 101 games in Baltimore, that seems like it would earn you some hardware.)
So what all that means is that Logan Webb most likely finished third in the Cy Young race. And hey, that’s fine. Fangraphs actually had him tied for fourth in WAR among NL pitchers — Snell, due to his poor walk rate which dragged down his FIP, was sixth, so don’t take that as voter’s gospel — so a third place finish is technically overperforming.
The Giants have not won one of the major awards for players — the ones listed by Passan above — since Buster Posey’s MVP year in 2012. That MVP capped out a pretty memorable 13 years, with Jeff Kent’s MVP, Barry Bonds’s four MVPs, Tim Lincecum’s two Cy Youngs, Posey’s Rookie of the Year, and then his MVP making for a pretty solid haul. There was bound to be a lull after all that hardware, and hey, here we are, in that lull. I liked it better in the pre-lull years, when the Giants were winning a bunch of stuff all the time, but I guess I didn’t get a vote.
Yes, Gabe Kapler won Manager of the Year in 2021, but that’s not exactly on the same level as a Cy Young, which is why I limited it to awards for players.
Now, it’s not like the Giants have won nothing since 2012. Obviously, there was the 2014 World Series. There have been some Gold Gloves, mostly for Brandon Crawford, but also for Posey and Joe Panik. And hey, the Giants had a Gold Glove finalist this year too, in Patrick Bailey.
He also lost.
Bailey was a truly great defensive catcher for several months this year, but a few things hurt his candidacy. First, he didn’t play that many games. Bailey played just 97 games, while the winner, the Diamondbacks’ Gabriel Moreno, played 111. Bailey also didn’t hit particularly well. Yeah, there’s a bunch of new computer models that aren’t supposed to take offense into account, but I grew up in the era where Rafael Palmeiro played 28 games at first base and won a Gold Glove there anyway, so I’ll believe it when I see it. And finally, and unavoidably, Bailey faded hard at the end of the year, both offensively and defensively.
When you put all that together, you get someone who, despite a very promising start behind the dish, wasn’t quite going to cut it. As the fatigue took hold, Bailey stopped throwing out nearly as many runners, and he started giving up passed balls too. You can’t just ignore that, and so, for the second straight year, no Giant won a Gold Dlove.
But one former Giant did! That would be Mauricio Dubón, who got the Gold Glove for AL utility player, a new category as of last year. Could the Giants have used a human Swiss Army Knife to plug in holes all over the field and hit like a capable major leaguer instead of wasting time on Mark Mathias? Well, yes, but they torched their relationship with Dubón in 2022 and then traded him away, so he wasn’t going to be an option anyway. Even with all that defensive value, Fangraphs only had him at a 1.9 WAR player in about 500 plate appearances, so he was perfectly okay but nothing more.
Still, it’s a little annoying, right? Like when Adam Duvall ended up being good for a few years in exactly the way the Giants needed someone to be good. The team could have used Dubón, assuming he’s stopped making the boneheaded mistakes that led everyone to be okay with giving up on him in the first place, but what’s done is done. You can’t cry over spilled sunflower seeds.
Anyway, we all know the REAL award this offseason is going to be Shohei Ohtani, and the Giants aren’t going to win that one either.
This stupid awards drama is starting to look like the Oscars.