This is one of the more interesting — and unique — times in baseball: awards season. Other leagues have MVPs, rookies of the year and various different honors. But baseball’s awards have a prestige unlike any other sport’s.
They have so much cachet, in fact, that even the dates of the awards are revealed in an announcement by baseball. Each award gets a day to itself so the winner can enjoy the praise and publicity.
On Tuesday, Philadelphia’s Roy Halladay was named the National League Cy Young Award winner as the league’s best pitcher. On Wednesday, both the NL and AL managers of the year were announced.
On Monday, the rookies of the year were revealed, an announcement that at one point seemed as if it would be of some importance to Washington Nationals fans. San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey won the NL honor — voted on before the postseason. Nationals pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg — his season was cut short because of a torn ligament in his right elbow — did not get a single vote.
Here’s the process for these awards: The selections are made by the Baseball Writers Association of America, which has chapters in nearly all of the cities where major league franchises are located. Washington is part of the Baltimore-Washington chapter.
Members of each chapters are asked to vote on specific awards. I voted on the NL manager of the year this season, and my choice was San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy. San Diego’s Bud Black turned out to be the winner.
Next week, the big ones — the AL (Monday) and NL (Tuesday) MVP awards — will be announced.
It gives baseball a chance — once the postseason ends and before the winter meetings, offseason trades and free agency begin — to garner some attention over the course of a week.
But several years ago, that system nearly changed drastically. Redskins owner Dan Snyder almost wound up owning the postseason baseball awards.
If you watch any amount of television, you know the popularity of awards shows in our star-struck society.
Dick Clark Productions, one of the most successful television production companies in the business, produces the Golden Globes, the American Music Awards and the Academy of Country Music Awards, among other shows.
A few years back, Dick Clark Productions saw the value and prestige of the baseball awards. So it made an offer to the BBWAA to buy the rights to produce a show featuring the awards.
But the BBWAA turned down the deal because it felt the awards got more attention and acclaim from the staggered schedule of announcements — and the attending publicity each award receives.
Under the Dick Clark Productions proposal, all the awards would have been presented in one program.
The irony of all this is if the BBWAA had made the deal with Dick Clark Productions, the owner of the awards show would have wound up being Snyder, who purchased Dick Clark Productions in 2007.
Baseball suffers through the insult every postseason of having the powerful NFL ratings thrown in its face. It would have been tough, then, to have an NFL owner producing the games’s most coveted awards.
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