It’s the end of the Cy as we know it …
Posted: November 16th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 20 Comments »
Over the years, I’ve had a conversation or three with Curt Schilling about the media. This may surprise you, but Schilling has some pretty strong opinions on that subject. In fact, I’m pretty sure there are not too many topics that Curt does not have strong opinions about. Oatmeal. He might not have a strong opinion about oatmeal.
Anyway, he has been more than happy to share with me his opinions about sportswriting in this country, and while I would not divulge the particulars, I don’t think he would me mind me passing along his overriding opinion that:
1. Most sportswriters don’t work hard enough.
2. Most sportswriters don’t get it right.
3. Most sportswriters have a personal agenda.
Now, I could ask most sportswriters about Curt Schilling and get some equally complementary responses, but that’s not my point. Lots of people — in and out of the games — feel this way about sportswriters. But unlike others, Curt Schilling may fundamentally change the way sportswriters do their jobs. Or at least the way they vote.
On 38pitches, Schilling’s blog, he listed off the particulars of his new deal with the Red Sox. There’s some guaranteed money, a few weight clauses, a few incentives for innings pitched, and then this:
$1 million for receiving a Cy Young vote, any vote.
I am led to believe that this mean that if Schilling gets mentioned anywhere on any single Cy Young ballot — we vote the top three places — then he will get, in the words of Austin Powers, one MEEEEEEL-YON dollars.
If this is truly the case, and if Commissioner Bud Selig allows this sort of incentive to stand, then I can promise you this: The Cy Young Award, as we know it (along with the MVP, Rookie of the Year, Manager of the Year, etc.) will cease to exist. BBWAA members — pretty much every last one of them — will no longer be allowed to vote on these awards.
The reason is obvious: I could not vote on something where my signature may or may not earn Curt Schilling $1 million. That’s not just a conflict of interest, that’s a skirmish of interest, a police action of interest, a full-fledged war of interest.
On the most simplistic level, what (other than conscience) would prevent Schilling (or anyone else who had this sort of incentive in their contract) from offering me $200,000 to vote him third on my Cy Young ballot? What would prevent me from taking it? IOf course Schilling would not do that and I would not take it (hell, the guy went 9-8, I have my standards … now if he went 16-12 — hey, $200,000 is a lot of money).
But beyond bribes, on the more real level, even if you did not take money, but you were the only guy who put Schilling on your Cy Young Ballot — wouldn’t he OWE you? I mean, really owe you? You just gave him a million bucks. You’ve got to believe he would do something to make it up, no? You might have Uma Thurman show up at your door or something.
Most newspapers would rather you not accept a FREE MEAL from a restaurant. There’s no way that any of us could vote in the Cy Young knowing that we could, with a few strokes of the pen, make Curt Schilling $1 million.
Of course, there have been Cy Young incentives — but up to now (as far as I know) they have been collective incentives. If a guy WINS the Cy Young he makes money — well, that’s the collective opinion of 28 sportswriters across the country. There are plenty of people who think even that is a conflict of interest — many newspapers no longer let their writers vote for any award of any kind (and you know the Associated Press no longer allows the BCS to use its Top 25 in determining who should play in the national championship game). I have always more liberal about it — I mean you could go crazy worrying about conflicts of interest. We’re all biased. Conflicts are in the everyday. Sportswriters make these sorts of ethical choices every day anyway. Who we quote. Who we blame for losses. Who we credit for victories. If, for example, I write a column about what a great guy and great player Alex Gordon is, some CEO might read that and give Alex Gordon an endorsement deal. That stuff happens all the time.
But Schilling’s Clause would push me over the edge. That’s $1 million for writing 12 letters on a piece of paper, and it’s too problematic. (*OK, yeah, it’s 13 letters. Fine. I screwed up. But I’ll bet if you wrote Curt Schiling, he would still get the money).
Now, some people — some people commenting right now, in fact — will say getting the BBWAA out of there is good thing. They will say that the BBWAA members have mucked up the awards for years. I’m not here to argue — heck, I just did a long post on bad MVP choices. I am here to say you have to be careful what you wish for: If the baseball writers don’t vote, who will do a better jab? The managers? Yeah, they do such a nice job on Gold Glove awards. The players themselves? Maybe, but if you think there’s a conflict of interest now … how about if other players had to vote on Schilling’s Cy Young award and whether he got $1 million?
A panel of experts? See: Committee, Veterans.
They could have announcers vote, or writers for MLB.com or various other people who, directly or indirectly are paid by baseball.
They could have a poll of fans. That could work. Love the fans. But those efforts are usually bulky, hard to do right (the All-Star Game is complained about every year), and nobody really wants to see the Cy Young Award turned into the People’s Choice Awards (does anyone else remember when Burt Reynolds, after winning his 49th People’s Choice or whatever it was, said in his acceptance speech something like: “How many of these would it take to get me an Oscar?â€)
Anyway, any and all of those choices. would change the nature of the awards, for better or, quite possibly, worse. I tried to make this point once before: The reason the MVP and the Cy Young are widely accepted and talked about is not that the writers get it right most of the time. It is not because people have a great deal of respect for sportswriters; I don’t know where we are on food chain, above or below lawyers and politicians (I love Vince Bugliosi’s line — people hate lawyers, people hate politicians, but people tend to love judges, even though they are both. Maybe we should all start wearing robes).
It is, simply, that sportswriters are uniquely qualified to vote because they see all the games, and yet they are not especially beholden to anybody in the game. We may vote stupidly. But we generally vote honestly.
Do our biases emerge? You bet. All the time. So does our our short-sightedness, our stupidity and our pettiness and every other human quality you want to bring up. But I still say the Cy Young, MVP, Rookie off the Year, Baseball Hall of Fame — these are still the most respected and talked-about honors in American sports. And the BBWAA is part of the reason for that. It may be the biggest reason for that.
I don’t know if this example will make any sense to you, but when I was a kid we used to play Monopoly all the time. And when I was playing with my brother and friends, we would just goof around, change the rules, quit in the middle, whatever. But if we played with my parents, then we played seriously — there was something “official†about the game. It isn’t that my parents were especially great Monopoly players or more honorable than other people (though, of course, I think they were), it’s just that they gave the game a certain authenticity and validity.
I think the BBWAA gives that to the awards. Plenty of people disagree. But I think so.
In any case, whether you think the BBWAA should still be voting on these awards or not, the simple truth is that the Schilling Clause will end it, if not immediately then in a very short time. If people are allowed to negotiate a deal where a 10th place MVP vote will earn them a half million, a 3rd place Rookie of the Year vote gets them a car, a 2nd place Manager of the Year vote kicks in an extra year on the contract — well, the writers can’t be a part of that. If this is really the Schilling deal, and Bud Selig does not step in, then things will change.
The BBWAA has voted for the Cy Young for more than 50 years. I would never tell you that sportswriters represent innocence. But this would mean the end of something.
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Why not get rid of the awards? They’re dumb, and the wrong people often win because most writers have no idea what they’re doing and seem to honestly believe that wins and batting average are good statistics.
I wouldn’t miss any of this nonsense one bit.
What surprises me is that Theo and the Sox would agree to this clause. I think that alone represents the opinion that him actually garnering a Cy vote, at his age, with his diminishing skills is a true long shot at best. As you said he was 9-8 and I think the third or fourth best pitcher on his own team last season. And the precedent alone is something Theo should be wary of.
And I agree with you. Selig should not allow it. Clauses like this just beg for impropriety and controversy. I also applaud the moral platform the BBWAA stands upon in your suggestion that they would withdraw from voting if this clause is allowed. I think i true, that sentiment, in and of itself, is reason enough to keep the current paradigm of writers voting, even given the shortcomings of human nature. And thank goodness at least one organization in this corporate / profit dominated country has a strcit moral conscience that cannot be bought off. Bravo.
I have two reactions:
1) The Veterans Committee is most definitely NOT a panel of experts. Never has been. It’s been many things, but it has almost always involved some mixture of old baseball players, baseball front office people and baseball writers, and all of those groups are most definitely biased. They may be experts in their individual fields, but almost always with some particular agenda. Plus, I’ve got news for you Joe, the Veterans Committee’s HOF selections haven’t been that much worse than the BBWAA’s once you account for the fact that they have never once been allowed to vote for a slam-dunk candidate. The voting process strips away all of the Ruth’s, Williams’, DiMaggio’s, Mantles, Seavers, etc, long before the VC is ever allowed to vote. Get to that next level of players where there are questions to be debated about their qualifications, and you’ll find that for nearly every Chick Hafey the VC elects while you scratch your head, there’s a Catfish Hunter or Rabbit Maranville or Herb Pennock that the BBWAA inducted for some lame reason or other.
2) Regardless of Schilling’s clause, BBWAA members are already wildly compromised by their various associations with players. Tony Massarotti co-authored Big Papi’s autobiography, meaning he’s now making money from his association with an active player. Peter Gammons has snug relationships with players and front office staff that allow his pet charity event to be well-attended. Several BBWAA members have local radio shows that are more popular, and therefore garner bigger ad revenues, if the local players appear from time to time. I haven’t seen any of these guys stripped of their voting rights or BBWAA membership, so why should the Schilling clause be any different? The days of the BBWAA, as a body, representing an impartial voice in evaluating players have been gone for a long, long time.
These clauses have been around for a while and many papers already do not allow their writers to vote. For example, I know the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun do not. Even for the Hall of Fame!
Three quick quibbles with an otherwise solid premise:
1. BBWAA does not equal “baseball writers.” There are lots of brilliant, professional baseball writers, perfectly qualified to vote, who are denied Association membership because they don’t work for newspapers.
2. The fact that the BBWAA-voted awards are “the most respected and talked-about awards” is probably circular. The guys with the widest readership — the people who set the agenda — are talking about “their” house awards. I’m not sure that reveals much, about the award.
3. Finally, Joe writes that “sportswriters are uniquely qualified to vote because they see all the games.” I’m not sure that’s really true, either. They may see more games/players than managers or players, but I suspect that writers, especially beat writers, are still awfully limited in how many players they see, how often.
Well basically you could end all the debate and choose the literal MVP’s by sabermetrics. Their votes could be could be based on where they stand on certain lists. For example, 1 point for being 1st in HR’s, 2 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, etc. Lowest score wins. I would think 6 categories should do it. The triple crown ones, AVG HR RBI, and then OPS, SB, and Runs. Heck, if you want to get fancy you could even park adjust the numbers. No more voting, it’s all done on the field and winning the awards would be real cause to get a bonus. Or finishing top 10, etc. Same thing with pitching. Go ERA, WHIP, Wins, Ks, Saves, and somehow factor in IP. Maybe use IP as a fractional factor where 80 would be the base for relievers and 180 for starters, then multiply the numbers based on that fraction. It could be toyed with to come up with better numbers. A pitcher that throws 220 innings would recieve a boost by multiplying by 220/180, while a pitcher injured for half the year that only throws 120 would be sufficiently penalized, although lower stats would do that already. Anyways, we already have the tools to measure it Win Shares also. You could just use that. Problem solved, no more stupid votes.
Or maybe you take the top 5, and then the writers can vote on that. Shouldn’t be any conflicts there as they were preselected by an unbiased system.
Any voting system is flawed. (Look at the 2000 elections.)
But I always thought the players should vote for the All Star team; perhaps with them not allowed to choose their own position. It’s the closest you can come up with players choosing up sides to play the kids on the other side of the field.
It’s not as if we need another reward, but it would be interesting to poll the top 10 hitters in a league for their opinion of which pitcher they least want to face. I remember an interview with George Brett years ago during a rain delay when he talked about pitchers who seemed to own him; not always great pitchers, but they seemed to always battle and won more than he cared to remember… and others, great pitchers, who he had success against.
I can’t remember the player, but when I was a kid, some guy said he thought carrying a bat to the plate against Sandy Koufax was a mere formality… why bother when he couldn’t see the pitches anyway?
That was Dr. Evil, Joe, not Austin Powers.
What about…
Take the major awards and increase the number of people that vote on them. Start with the BBWAA, then add a couple television sportscasters from each city/team, two or three bloggers per team, and throw in a pile of writers that work for national publications and sports networks. (If you think this is my way of getting Bob Costas _and_ Aaron Gleeman a vote, you’re right) The more voters, the better. Let’s get that number up there – if we could assemble a list of a thousand people, that would be great. Each voter fills out their ballot and sends it in.
Now.
The accounting firm that handles the vote randomly selects fifty ballots from the original thousand and uses those ballots to determine the winner. These randomly selected ballots are never identified, so the process remains a secret ballot.
With this structure, each voter cannot be entirely sure that their ballot was one of the fifty that counted. In fact, the odds are 20 to 1 against it. So if a vote for Schilling did come up, no one will know who voted for him. Even if you wanted to vote for him, and assured Schilling you would help him out, your ballot only has a 5 percent chance of counting, so your assurance doesn’t really count for much. If Schilling got that single vote, it might have come from somebody else’s selected ballot, while yours sat in the rejected pile.
It’s the old firing squad technique of not telling the squad who has the live bullet, so if there was any lingering guilt, it would be easier to deal with, because chances are that you fired a blank.
All that being said, Bud Selig does need to nip this little clause in the bud right now, because you want to avoid situations where the possibility of impropriety may exist. I like incentive clauses in principle, but not the ones based on awards.
I agree that Selig should disallow that clause. I also agree that one has to accept the infiltration of bias and personality into voting, and the writers aren’t any more or less likely to be overridden by theirs just because they are writers (Boston writers, however, do have a bit of a history of that, so…..). Relationships are an inevitable part of people being forced into contact with each other, and I think you can usually tell when there is an inappropriate clouding by personal feelings, and I think that if there is anyone who does not fall into that category it’s Peter Gammons (just an opinion).
I think that the problem with the award/hall of fame voting (aside from the inherent ambiguity of their mandates) isn’t that the voting pool is tainted or unqualified (although it sounds like some of you are saying a lot of quality papers aren’t letting their writers vote, which could be excluding some of the more sophisticated minds, I have no idea), it’s that it is too monochromatic. I think 1,000 voters is a bit much, and random ballots wouldn’t be an appropriate system in this instance (what if it ended up being the 50 voters from LA, or New York? that wouldn’t be a very good representation of the community at large), but there should definitely be more voices. The issues that have arisen from the Veterans Committee over the years mostly came from a period when it had a fairly small membership that was prone to cronyism. I believe the committee now consists of the entire living membership of the Hall, which I think is a good thing, letting peers determine their peers. As far as the rest of the baseball voting, instead of the managers, or the writers, or the fans, there should just be a body of “experts” from the various walks of life of baseball: the writers, announcers, exec’s, (gulp) scouts, players, coaches, tv, internet, etc., anyone who is around the game enough to form a personally informed opinion of a high quality except agents. If one (say a little “blue ribbon” committee appointed by MLB) was to take the top minds from those fields (and offer them membership), it shouldn’t be hard to put together a fairly long list that few would find fault with, and broad enough to iron out most of the “quirks” that seem to arise. The list should be updated every year, and they could vote en masse (Hall of Fame for sure), or be randomly assigned into groups for each vote (gold glove, all-star, MVP, etc.) from each field, so that say Tim Kurkjian one year votes for the All-Star game, Rookie of the Year, and Gold Glove, and the next year only for Manager of the year, and so on, while Pat Gillick votes for the Silver Slugger, and the next year the Hank Aaron Award. There would probably have to be certain exclusions (should exec’s get to vote for exec of the year? some form of semi-secret ballot so that you can’t vote for yourself?) but if the body is chosen wisely it shouldn’t be a problem. This is America, there should be a system with some checks and balances.
I think you’re right about BBWWA’s perch. It is unique, and these awards are meaningful in large part to the organization. You’re also right that the awards are imperfect, as all awards are. I think it makes sense to protect the quirky institutions that make baseball, baseball. Even if it’s at the expense of Rob Neyer and Joe Sheehan (both fine writers in their own right). So why not change the language in the CBA that currently prohibits incentives based on performance? I believe the origin of the rules is Marvin Miller’s insistence that players be paid on current market value, and not subjected to a pay for performance structure. That’s still a risk, to some extent. But I think most of the fears about ownership have subsided. Guaranteeing Schilling $1 million for reaching his 100th strikeout would have the same impact.
How about we just pay these guys cash. Remove incentives altogether. You’ll be paid based on past performance and future projection. We’ll just keep it simple. If the player’s union insists on ruining the professional game, how will all of these guys make money?
Before you call me old fashioned let me suggest getting rid of the DH and wild card too.
“That’s $1 million for writing 12 letters on a piece of paper, and it’s too problematic.”
Since when does “Curt Schilling” have only 12 letters?
One interesting thing about the Schilling clause: it was reportedly Theo Epstein’s idea. I can’t decide just what message he was trying to send. Another interesting thing: how ready sportswriters are to suggest that their brethren can be bought. BTW, Schilling said the other day that if he got a vote he didn’t think he deserved, he’d either refuse to accept the money or just donate it to charity.
I don’t mean to pick, Aaron, but I find your plan woefully lacking. I’d call it “fantasy baseball”, not sabermetric. The categories would have to be weighted, because a stolen base for example is not worth as much as a home run. And runs and rbi are team and lineup dependent. And you’d be double-counting AVG in OPS. And yes, it would have to be park adjusted. And most importantly you’re not accounting for defense at all. And on and on…
But if you wanted to go that route you could use Win Shares, WARP or some other all-inclusive metric. Again, sorry to pile on. No wonder there’s a lot of resentment toward saber-types.
Re: Paul White, post #3:
Not that Catfish Hunter is the apex of the Hall’s membership, but he was voted in by the writers, not the VC.
Snuckles – You may want to re-read my comment.
“…for nearly every Chick Hafey the VC elects while you scratch your head, there’s a Catfish Hunter or Rabbit Maranville or Herb Pennock that the BBWAA inducted…”
VC – Hafey
BBWAA – Hunter, Maranville, Pennock
Sorry if that’s not clear.
I agree with Chris.
This is similar to People’s “sexiest english-speaking person on the planet” award, voted on by whoever People’s deems worthy.
I’d like the writer’s to vote on the award, and NOT report on the award. Let the rest of the world establish its relevancy. Heck, the reason you have the award is so you have something to report on. Since when are journalists part of the story?
Please tell me that nobody here really thinks for even half a second that the guy who “avoided” the inherent conflict of interest of owning a team in the league while serving as commissioner of the league by putting the team he owned into a temporary trust run by his daughter will be able to even realize that there’s a potential conflict of interest here, let alone show any interest in doing anything to stop it.
But this conflict of interest doesn’t benefit Selig or the Brewers, so he might not be as blind as you think.
The only thing that is wrong with the BBWAA voting–and everyone reading a blog already knows this–is the stereotypical, oozing superiority of the crusty old beat reporter. Newspapers are dying, and it’s denizens are frightfully nostalgic. And thanks to all the good work of the ‘basement geeks’ with ‘absolutely no credentials,’ those that aren’t afraid of new acronyms have been swayed.
Embrace the future, BBWAA!