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Welcome to Manager of the Year Day! Oh www.atlantafalconsteamonline.com , what a day this is, every year. I know you’re probably getting ready for your Manager of the Year watch party, and you’re making a chips-and-dip platter in the shape of Bruce Bochy’s head. Expecting a lot of people, are you? Ha ha, just a little manager humor, folks, but, yes, the whole sports world is talking about the Manager of the Year Award!Which is to say, nobody is talking about the Manager of the Year Award. Take a list of preseason projections, match them up with the postseason teams, look for an outlier, and skip the voting. Save everybody some time. It’s the dumbest award. Matt Williams won it in 2014, a couple weeks after a poor decision ruined the Nationals’ postseason hopes, and a year before his final managerial season ever. Paul Molitor won it last year, and the Twins have already let him go. Once, I wrote a big, long article about a better way to determine the Manager of the Year Award, and it was so dumb that Google stopped indexing it, and now I can’t find it. It’s better this way. There is no fixing this award, so I would like to complain about it for awhile, just to get a few things off my chest. Here is the exact problem with the Manager of the Year Award, in two headers. 1. National writers have no business pretending like they know who deserves the awardUnlike MVP Atlanta Falcons T-Shirt , Cy Young, or Rookie of the Year, the Manager of the Year should be awarded in great part because of what happens off the field. That is, the Manager of the Year should improve the morale of a team and have the ability to navigate a testosterone-filled minefield of exhausted millionaires, all of whom have spent their whole life not struggling at baseball before struggling for the first time. It’s one thing to chuckle and gurgle something out about baseball being a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s another to make decisions in a way that keeps the attention and faith of a disparate group of 25 different players (along with a taxi squad of scared, overwhelmed rookies who will float through for the first, and sometimes only, time of their major league career.)Great managers can do this. Average managers can look at a cheat sheet and determine which reliever to bring into a tight situation. Above-average managers can filter all of the data coming in from their coaches and players to figure out correctly which relievers should be available and which position players need a day off. Great managers are doing all of the above, but tying it all together with a rare brand of forward-thinking leadership that commands attention and respect. Like hell do I know if Craig Counsell does all of that better than Brian Snitker. But there are national writers who are far more connected, far more attuned to the scuttlebutt, who work tirelessly to take the pulse of all 15 teams in a given league. They at least have a hint about which teams are up, which teams are down, and which teams are overachieving because of the person in charge. Is this a list of those writers, though? No idea. But probably not. Not all of them, at least. A healthy chunk will look at preseason expectations vs. season record and go back to the job that pays them. And it’s a revolving group of writers who votes on the award, so even if you’re somehow lucky enough to get a group of writers who are entirely committed to the Manager of the Year one year, you might not get the same group the next year. It’s too much to cover. Even if there were a specific managers beat, where a writer spent all of his or her day, every day, detailing only the ins and outs of different managerial decisions and rumors, it would be a tough gig to wrangle. But that job description doesn’t exist Atlanta Falcons Hats , so it becomes an impossible task for the typical beat writer, even if they take it as seriously as possible. 2. Local beat writers have no business pretending like they know who deserves the awardThey’re too close, you see. It’s like when Baseball America releases their top-100 prospects list, and fans of different teams complain about the specific rankings of their organization’s prospects. They can’t comprehend the existence of 29 other farm systems because they’ve spent all of their effort focusing on one farm system. Which is normal. But it’s why fan-based top-100 lists aren’t a thing. Ranking the 50 best MLB free agents for the 2018-2019 offseasonThe Yankees are pretending they won’t make big free agency moves and it’s hilarious3 possible motivations behind the Nationals’ 10-year, $300 million offer to Bryce HarperYes, bad teams should sign Bryce Harper and Manny MachadoBeat writers who spend nearly 200 days with managers (spring training, included) are likely to have a fantastic handle about what is going on. They’ll know if a manager should have lost a clubhouse, but hasn’t, and they’ll know when the opposite is true. They’ll have a great idea of how a manager has set his team up for success, and they’ll be among the dozen or so most qualified people in the world to make that determination. Great. Now do it for the other 14 teams. It’s an unreasonable request, of course, because there just isn’t that much time. But if we’re accepting that beat writers have a wealth of information about the qualifications of the manager they cover, we also have to accept they have a dearth of information about the other managers. They might hear things about managers in their own division, sure, and they’ll likely compare notes with fellow scribes. But to make a qualified determination about Manager X being better than Manager Y? They have far too much information in one column, and there’s no way they can make it up for the other column. The answer is probably something like this: Whittle down the candidates to the top three or five. Have the representative writers from each team get together and state their case. Debate. Discuss. Draw from the statistical and anecdotal, and if you believe that the manager you covered deserves the award, try to convince the other writer. Then, and maybe only then, would we get an award that better matches reality. After all that work, there would still be nobody who cared about the Manager of the Year Award. So the current system is probably the best system. There’s never going to be a great one. Task some writers who take the job seriously, and hope they get it right. Accept that they’re doing an awful lot of guesswork and speculation, and move on to the real awards. Welcome to Manager of the Year Day! It’s not that bad Atlanta Falcons Hoodie , really. I feel better. It’s not that bad once you get a few things off your chest, and I look forward to congratulating the managers who weren’t expect to do a bunch before this season started, only to have some success. Welcome to MLB awards season, with the Baseball Writers Association of America honors finishing things off. The final awards were Most Valuable Players, with Christian Yelich taking home National League honors and Mookie Betts in the American League.Blake Snell became the second Tampa Bay Rays pitcher to win the American League Cy Young Award on Wednesday. Jacob deGrom was awarded for his stellar season with the struggling Mets, capturing National League honors.That followed Ronald Acua Jr. and Shohei Ohtani capturing Rookie of the Year honors on Monday, followed by Braves skipper Brian Snitker and A’s manager Bob Melvin taking Manager of the Year Awards on Tuesday.The Rawlings Gold Glove Award winners were announced on Nov. 3, and if you missed them you can’t be blamed. For some reason, the BBWAA announced that award on a Sunday night (opposite football) more than a week before the rest of this year’s MLB awards will be handed out and before the other nominees were even announced. If you missed any of the winners, you can find them here. The Silver Slugger Awards were extra notable this season with Red Sox slugger J.D. Martinez winning at not one but two positions, the first player ever to do so.Award finalists and winnersAL Most Valuable Player Mookie Betts — Red Sox WINNERJose Ramirez — IndiansMike Trout — AngelsBetts was the main cog in a Red Sox lineup that led the majors in runs and most offensive categories. The outfielder hit .346/.438/.640, leading the AL in batting average and slugging percentage, while hitting 47 doubles, 32 home runs and stealing 30 bases.NL Most Valuable PlayerNolan Arenado — RockiesJavy Baez — CubsChristian Yelich — Brewers WINNERYelich came within an eyelash of winning the Triple Crown, and led the Brewers to the best record in the National League in his first year with Milwaukee. Yelich received 29 of 30 first-place votes in a runaway, with Baez finishing a distant second and Arenado third. NL Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom got the other first-place vote, and finished fifth in the MVP balloting.AL Cy Young Corey Kluber — IndiansBlake Snell — Rays WINNERJustin Verlander — AstrosSnell led the American League with 21 wins and a 1.89 ERA, and though he only pitched 180鈪?innings the Rays left-hander packed in 219 strikeouts, the second Tampa Bay pitcher to win the award, joining David Price in 2012.The voting was close, with Snell receiving 17 first-place votes to 13 for Verlander, outpacing the Astros right-hander 169 total points to 154.NL Cy Young Jacob deGrom — Mets WINNERAaron Nola — PhilliesMax Scherzer — NationalsPoor run support and a lost season for the Mets meant deGrom didn’t get many actual wins, finishing just 10-9. But in terms of preventing runs Customized Atlanta Falcons Jerseys , nobody was better than deGrom with his 1.70 ERA in 32 starts, with a career-best 269 strikeouts in 217.All Scherzer did after winning back-to-back NL Cys was whiff 300 batters and post a 2.53 ERA. He settles for second place in this year’s voting, his sixth straight season finishing in the top five in his league’s Cy Young balloting. AL Rookie of the Year Miguel Andujar — Yankees Shohei Ohtani — Angels WINNERGleyber Torres — YankeesNL Rookie of the Year Ronald Acu帽a, Jr. — Braves WINNER Juan Soto — NationalsWalker Buehler — DodgersShohei Ohtani, who will be out all of 2019 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, wins AL Rookie of the Year with 25 of the 30 first place votes. Acu帽a did him two better with 27 first place votes to take the honor in the NL.AL Manager of the Year Kevin Cash — Rays Bob Melvin — A’s WINNER Alex Cora — Red Sox NL Manager of the Year Bud Black — Rockies Craig Counsell — BrewersBrian Snitker — Braves WINNER Snitker becomes the first Braves manager not named Bobby Cox to win for Atlanta, and makes sense based on how far ahead of schedule the team turned out to be this year. The A’s needed a lot of luck over the summer but exceeded expectations with Bob Melvin leading the way as well. This entire process is broken but congrats to those guys.Awards previewTwo Yankees get the AL Rookie of the Year nod in Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar in a group that has no surprises, and NL Rookie of the Year is a similarly expected bunch with Soto, Acu帽a, and Buehler all making the final cut. What a strong, fun year for rookies. Unsurprisingly, the man who managed the Red Sox to a World Series in his rookie season is here in the form of Alex Cora. Dave Roberts didn’t make the cut for Manager of the Year for leading the Dodgers back to the Fall Classic opposite Cora’s Sox, for obvious reasons though. Black, Counsell, and Snitker are all worthy candidates in that category. The only “maybe” in the Cy Young categories was whether Chris Sale would sneak in as the third finalist, but the end of his season mostly doomed him there. The six finalists all had excellent seasons, and if deGrom doesn’t win for the National League we march at dawn. Both of the MVP categories seem like they are already decided at this point, with both Yelich and Betts indeed in the final group as expected. Not that there can’t be surprises, but those are wins that nobody could really quibble with this year. Baez’s inclusion in the top three is a nice surprise but he probably won’t go the distance there, and Betts is all but a foregone conclusion at this point. Especially now that we know J.D. Martinez is not a finalist so is less likely to have taken a lot of votes away from Betts if that is indeed how some voters were thinking. Tune in next week when we find out who won!