Are the Post-Season Awards A Sign We're All Growing Up?

The post-season awards in baseball have served as an occasion to highlight the chasm between advanced baseball analytics and the sports' hidebound writers, broadcasters and self-proclaimed cognoscenti. 

This year, however, there's not much opportunity for that. For one thing, the gap is narrowing. Sports media have adopted, to a greater or lesser degree, OPS and WAR, and while they continue to cling to pitching wins, seem to understand better the need to examine the larger picture when examining player performance.

In addition, several of the big awards seemed predestined, as if Martin Luther himself had cast a ballot. For example, Clayton Kershaw, already the best pitcher on the planet, turned it up a notch in '14. Even statheads can't argue with 21-3, 1.77 and 11 strikeouts per nine innings, particularly when he posts a league-leadoing 7.5 WAR despite missing the first month of the season.

And Mike Trout, the MVP-in-waiting, led his league in runs, RBIs and total bases while clubbing 36 home runs and playing a premier defensive position. He, too, paced the circuit in WAR with 7.9. Setting aside the argument whether pitchers should compete for a second award, these two were the clear MVP champs.

Likewise Rookie of the Year, where Jose Abreu and Jacob deGrom ran away with the hardware, or Kershaw at Cy Young, a conclusion so obvious it could less be said to be foregone than fifteengone. Only AL Cy Young was up for discussion, with Cory Kluber squeaking by Felix Hernandez.

Parsing the two was an academic exercise -- they posted similar won-loss records, innings pitched and runs allowed. King Felix allowed fewer baserunners; Kluber fanned more. Hernandez suffered from King Felix fatigue among the voters, and also from the legitimate belief that Cleveland is a tougher place to pitch than Seattle. If that was the finger on the scale provided Kluber's margin of victory, bully for the voters.

That there is a manager of the year award is a testament to writers' overblown self-importance; they can't possibly know which managers are best. That said, Buck Showalter seems a reasonable choice given his previous performance and his team's unexpected accomplishments. Matt Williams seems like an odd choice in the NL both because the Nats were generally considered the best team and because many observers view him as a work in progress. Perhaps most damning of all is Ned Yost's third place finish in the AL: his play-calling has come under withering criticism from knowledgeable analysts.

But that's the point about managers, isn't it? In-game strategy is much less important than in-clubhouse moral-building, and that's the part of the game even sportswriters generally don't see. Which is why the award is nonsense no matter who votes on it.