The Gold Gloves™ angried up my blood!

Ok, I swore to myself that in predicting the winners of the Gold Gloves™ (rather than who should win) that I wouldn’t let myself get angered by the results because I was acknowledging the silly ways that the coaches and managers vote on the award.  Besides, I did this last year.  Nevertheless, here I am!

There weren’t even any egregious decisions in the NL voting this year.  Yeah, Chase Utley should probably have won, but I can’t really say he’s overwhelmingly better than Brandon Phillips this year.  I just think he has probably deserved to win for a while and I’d be sad if he didn’t ever win.  Second basemen tend not to age well.  Scott Rolen’s also very good, but I can’t help but think that an improved offensive year combined with being on a playoff team allowed him to win the award.  Really, I’m not complaining about the actual winners, just the process.

Coaches and managers vote on the Gold Gloves™.  They can’t vote for their own players, and the OF spots are lumped into three awards not differentiated by position.  Other than that, anything goes.  I’d be surprised if most of those coaches or managers look at any numbers before voting, but if they do I would bet it’s mostly limited to (mostly useless) fielding percentage.  Usually guys that are good defensively have good defensive reputations among the coaches and managers, which is why the awards are usually closer to right than wrong.  However, as I mentioned with Scott Rolen, I think playing for a winning team and having a good offensive year are almost as important as a. having won before; and b. actually being good at defense.  When giving my predictions to my friend Chris, I said that if the Cubs had had a better year, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Marlon Byrd win a Gold Glove™ for his good offensive year, good defensive reputation (he just looks like he’s playing hard out there!), and his big play in the All-Star game throwing out David Ortiz at 2nd base.

I’m not really blaming the voters for the bad choices, either.  They’ve just finished a long year, they probably don’t really take it too seriously, and they don’t really get to watch all the players on whom they’re voting except for when their teams are matched up against each other.  I’m sure I’m not pointing out anything new.  I really only have two rather mild suggestions to improve the voting.  They’re not ideal, but I think they could realistically be implemented.

1. Give the vote to the same pool of voters for other major MLB awards.  I understand there are politics involved and that the Gold Glove™ is obviously not a BBWAA award, like the MVP, RoY, and Cy Young are, but when the mainstream media discusses a player’s accolades, Gold Gloves™ are often included in the same breath.  If that comes up in discussion of a player’s place in history, we should be striving for a better way to award those trophies.

2. More transparency.  I’m a proponent of this in pretty much all facets of life, but with regard to baseball awards, it makes sense.  With the rise of twitter, blogs, and basically the whole internet, people have more access to nearly all writers.  Some writers are making their ballots public for whatever award they vote on.  Keith Law took a lot of heat over including Javier Vazquez on his NL Cy Young ballot last year, but he was able to respond to his critics and explain himself.  Many still didn’t agree, but at least he was able to present his reasons and defend them.  I think transparency should be a requirement of all award ballots, actually.  I’d like to see all the ballots, with a rank order of at least three candidates.

This brings me to a larger point.  At this point, I’m a baseball fan for life.  They’ve got me.  I read about baseball, I watch baseball, I listen to podcasts talking about baseball.  I know that the award results are a flawed process, and that flawed processes can produce flawed results.  I have an idea about how I’d figure out who the best fielders are, and it has nothing to do with “fielding percentage.”  But, just like with improving the accuracy of umpiring calls, we need to improve accountability.  When there’s accountability, it makes more genuine the credibility these awards already have.  The casual fan still uses Gold Gloves™ to see who was “the best” in a given year.  It’d be great for the sport if doing so was actually a useful tool.

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