The following people were among those who got votes for National League MVP: Barry Bonds (winner), Albert Pujols (AARP member), Gary Sheffield, Jim Thome, Javy Lopez, Eric Gagne, Sammy Sosa (I think Joe Buck voted for him), Mark Prior…Juan Pierre (still afraid of the ivory), Miguel Cabrera (huh?), Mark Grudzielanek (really?), Jim Edmonds (Lassie must have a vote) and Dontrelle Willis (oh, shoot me.)
Now that’s not the whole list. But it just goes to show you something we’ve known all along. Sportswriters are morons.
Granted, they are asked to rank the players 1-10 on a ballot. But who was the nitwit who gave Jim Edmonds an eighth place vote after a season in which his second half numbers were .214 with 11 homers and 22 RBI?
You can tell that some of the writers kept their ballots until the playoffs and voted for Cabrera, because there’s no way he gets an MVP vote for hitting .268 with 12 homers during the season. Of course the rules say you are only to consider the regular season, but we know that doesn’t always happen.
How does Gruddy get a vote and Kerry Wood gets none? I’m surprised Wendell Kim didn’t get a vote. Maybe Dusty wears wristbands in the dugout to pick up a stray MVP vote or two from the more senile members of the Baseball Writers’ Association who might think he’s still an active player?
So Barry Bonds wins his sixth MVP and because that’s three more than anyone else has ever won he’s the greatest player of all time, right? Uh…not on that alone. Consider that Babe Ruth probably would have won six or seven or ten.
The list of past NL winners is curious. Barry has won three in a row, and well deserved. But did anybody remember that Chipper Jones won in 1999? Sammy, of course, won in 1998, and it was also well deserved since he was so much happier all year than Mark McGwire was. Or something. But he did deserve it on merits. Although, Cardinals fans still develop an eye twitch when you remind them that McGwire’s “great” 1998 season didn’t get him an MVP and that he was the single season home run king for a whopping three years. Hee hee.
Ken Caminiti won in 1996, and not only that he was unanimous. Voting that year, in addition to the Baseball Writers Association were a collection of crack whores, Harley Davidson dealers and Darryl Strawberry.
Bonds also won in 1990, 1992 and 1993, and should have won in 1991 but the writer’s gave the award to the great Terry Pendleton. Pendleton won because…he wasn’t Barry.
On ESPN last night, one of the talking heads said that Pujols is a kid and will have many, many chances to win the award. Kid? Anybody who can tell first hand tales of harrowing exploits in the Spanish-American War is not a kid.
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As you may have already read, Desipio is in the book business now. We have compiled some of the funniest, wittiest, dumbest and most sentimental columns from the 2003 Cubs season and put them into this book, “Oops, They Did It Again — The 2003 Chicago Cubs.” The book is availabe from the good folks at cafepress.com through our very own Desipio Crap Fiesta store. Shop early and shop often. We need the cash.
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The Bulls lost again last night, and as I was finishing up the cover design (let’s just say they don’t make it easy to make it purty–though the inside looks very professional–trust me) for the book, I had the Phoenix feed of the Bulls-Suns thanks to the good folks at NBA.com. Eddie Johnson is the color analyst for the Suns and it was so cute, he thinks that Jake Voskuhl can actually play. I love them when they’re this age.
Do the Suns have a guy named Chupacabra on their team? Isn’t that the mythical goat sucking monster? Is that legal? No wonder Eddy Curry was afraid to go into the lane. I don’t blame him.
By the way, I’m a huge fan of the Home Depot orange the Suns are wearing on the road this year. You can see it in the photo in Zarko’s Suns profile. Very distinguished.
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Rosey’s sniffing glue again. He thinks the top three vote getters in the AL MVP race should have been David Ortiz (whuh?), Esteban Loiaza (chuckle) and Shannon Stewart (guffaw.) Go take a nap, Steve.
This just in, the Bulls are not good at this west coast road trip thing.
Pippen says that it’s wrong to blame Bill Cartwright. He thinks we should all still bame Jerry Krause. Just out of principle.
Who’s running this ship? Anybody?
Mariotti puts down the doughnut to promote Doc Rivers for Bulls’ coach. Check out this line from this “messterpiece.” Allow me this opportunity to say I take no delight in my role as one-man clearinghouse of local coaches and managers. There are other sporting commentators in town, I do believe, but few have pointed out the obvious. I was the one who wrote Jerry Manuel should be fired and Ozzie Guillen should be hired, which happened. I’m the one who thinks Dick Jauron should be fired and Nick Saban or Bob Stoops should be hired, which might happen.
We need to clip and save him taking credit for the Ozzie Guillen hiring, because when it blows up this year, and it will, you’ll see Mariotti ripping the Sox for ever hiring him. That’s a guarantee.
Even Flash Gordon is too expensive for the Sox to keep. Who can they pay? I have a feeling you’ll see Bobby Thigpen and Donn Pall in the bullpen again this year.
The Illini are still unsure about the Sandwich Man.
Kobe Bryant has to take an AIDS test. He’s confident. He’s been studying for weeks.
Ramon Hernandez is not exactly Johnny Bench, but he’s no Damian Miller, either. Is everybody going to get a new catcher except the Cubs?
Methinks Billy Beane is outsmarting himself here. Bobby Kielty’s a nice player, but Ted Lilly can pitch, and he’s lefthanded. Those are two rare things. Then again, the A’s might already have the two best lefties in the league, so what do I know?
Nice of MEshawn Johnson to tell the world he told his coach, Jon Gruden, that he’d rather retire than play for him, and then act all indignant that Gruden would deactivate him. What the hell is he supposed to do after you say something like that? Good riddance.
The Rangers say there’s a 95 percent chance that A-Rod stays put. I’d put that at 100 percent, myself.
Andy Pettitte is talking with both the Astros and Red Sox. Desipio Insiders tell us that he told the Astros he wanted a lot of money and big hat, and he told the Red Sox that since he’s still a Yankee he thought it’d be fun to “screw with y’all a little bit.”
The great Raul Ibanez (he, of the smallest head in the majors) is going back to Seattle.
The Giants aren’t going to sign Vladimir Guerrero and Gary Sheffield. Really? You don’t say?
The Reds have made Jerry Manuel a finalist for their managerial job. Why?
The Diamondbacks are looking at Jesse Orsoco and Jeff Fassero for their bullpen. On the D’backs could still find guys to make the average age of that team go UP. And apparently getting outs is not a priority.
It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s really, really bad.
And the Brits wonder why Gee Dub brought hundreds of Secret Service agents with him?
Is this turning you on baby? Yeah? Hey, would you sign this legal document that proves you are willingly about to f@#$ my brains out?
A baby with no anus now has one. No…really.
Britney says that Justin Timberlake’s wanker is tiny. Wait? How would she know? Perhaps she has access to his medical records. Yes, that must be it.
I guarantee you that Jim Edmonds will back me up here that what this man did was wrong.
America’s finest news source with a story about a “sort of attractive” girl who got half-heartedly hit on in Tennessee.
Okay, show of hands, who thought that Keyshawn would be benched this year before I was?
Dez, you have hands???
Why save this article from that molecule of fecal dust, Jay Mariotti? Allow me to go back to late August 2000 when Eddie Munster dispensed this nugget:
"The Bears should kick Dick Jauron upstairs and give the reigns to Gary Crowton before Crowton leaves the Bears for bigger and better things." (I’m paraphrasing, but I remember this hilarious Onion-knockoff like I read it yesterday)
Yes. That’s right. People Magazine reporter wannabe Mariotti, due to his starstruck awe and complete lack of sports knowledge, was allowed to write, for public consumption, that absurd suggestion which didn’t make sense at the time. At the time, it sounded insane. 12 weeks later, as Crowton was headed out the door after a truly disastrous second year in order to drive the BYU program into the ground, the story just became pathetically hilarious.
Funny. You don’t see Mariotti bring up these asinine predictions that blow up in his fat face.
Andy,
Let’s just go ahead and add one of tomorrow’s links now:
Cameron says that Justin’s wanker is humongous. Jim Edmonds agrees.
No, I don’t have hands, but I practice well, and Dick Jauron likes me. So I’ve got that goin’ for me.
We like Dez because he catches every pass we throw to him in our "shadow" drills. If you’re not familiar with those, it’s a drill in which we run our plays without a defense or a ball. We simulate the plays and pretend to throw and catch the passes. Dez is awesome. He juggles a few, but never drops any in the shadow drills.
I was just wondering why Dez asked us to show our hands when he has never shown us his hands in a couple years…
I like Dez’s hands. We have faith in Dez’s hands. Sometimes things that work well in practice don’t seem to work in game, like Dez’s hands or John Shoop’s brain.
But we believe that this football team will succeed and Dez’s hands will be an important part of that.
Besides, I was talking to Jerry Krause and he saw Dez’s mother’s hands…
Everyone always gripes about guys on losing teams winning the award (A-Rod). They always say that they could’ve finished last without him. What happens when the team is so good they could win without him? Why is it always about place? I think it should be more about record. W/o A-Rod Texas would’ve been down another 15 games. That’s still valuable.
Hi, TW.
Again, Alex Rodriguez was so valuable to the Rangers that they’ve gotten better the last three years, right?
And we really went into the tank the year after ARod left, right?
Sorry Lou…I wasn’t aware that MVP was determined over a period of time greater than a season. And you only improved 8 games after A-Rod left. Then Ichiro came over. Too much on the hair dye Lou.
Seattle had a lot of talent surrounding A-Rod when he was there… Texas has had… Um… I’m thinking… A declining Rafael Palmeiro??? No starting pitching??? No bullpen??? Sure, A-Rod’s the cause of Texas’s problems… Maybe if they would have gotten some players around him they would have won. The Cubs would have the players around him if the Cubs get him. Yeah, Alex may be a clubhouse problem, but so is Sammy, and we got five outs away from the World Freakin’ Series with Sammy on our team…
Surely I am not the only one who noticed that the Cubs did not fall apart during any one of Sammy’s three prolonged absences last year?
You are right stew, the Cubs didn’t fall apart. But they played much better towards the end of the season, when we finally got Sammy going…
My point is that, however much we love the talent of Kerry Wood, he hasn’t reached his potential as a starter and probably never will. I think by this time five years from now he’ll be a closer. I think a trade for A-Rod would be the right move if it is ONLY for Wood.
The League MVP concept has become a joke. None of the writers can agree on what exactly they’re voting on, so usually the award is just "Offensive Player of the Year". Defense is usually not considered (see Giambi, Jason) and pitchers rarely even get votes, the rational being that the CY Young award is for the "pitching MVP". I don’t see how you can say a guy shouldn’t get the MVP because he played on a losing team. There are too many factors that go into winning in baseball to point to one guy and say "he’s the reason".
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