It was a fear of mine that the flash of Beltre or the flare and panache that the Big Cardinal three would cloud the eyes of the MVP voters in the NL. I was afraid they might lose sight of the fact that while the other four major candidates for the award had fantastic, even miraculous seasons, that none of them were the Most Valuable Player.
Not even close. One man in baseball changes the game like no other, and his name is Barry Bonds. The sportswriters (and my fellow bloggers) agreed with me, on the MVP. They ignored the typical numbers that define an MVP and looked at numbers in light of the BBE (Barry Bonds Era). Brooks, Aho and I extended this same sabermetric grace to CY Young candidates, (although I don't care if you evaluate Santana in conventional, unconventional, sbaermetric, bianary or roman-numeral terms, he won it ever way) and it was Randy who came out on top. Just for a point of comparison, I've also included Jason Schmidt's numbers
W L ERA IP K/9 K/BB AVG SLG
C 18 4 2.98 214.1 9.15 2.76 .217 .329
J 16 14 2.60 245.2 10.62 6.59 .197 .315
S 18 7 3.20 225.0 10.04 3.26 .202 .323
With the exception of ERA and wins, Schmidt was better than Clemens. Neither was even close to Johnson. He was a force to be reckoned with. HE THREW A PERFECT GAME. I know some of the terminology can be difficult, but I think this one is self explanatory. Randy was dominant this season, just shy of three hundred strikeouts. Clemens had 218 (Jason came in at 251). If the DBacks would have scored him just three runs a game ...
Unlike previous years, I will not argue that Jason Schmidt was robbed of a Cy Young award, even when all of his statistics were perceptibly better than Clemens, even given injury problems. After deciding to vote for Bonds, the sportswriters of this country must have turned off there brains and jumped on the star spangled bandwagon, thinking how wonderful it was that Clemens hadn't retired. I would have been much happier if he drove off into the sunset in his Steinbrenner-bought Hummer, so that Randy "Dead Eye" Johnson could have sauntered up to the conference table and got the respect he so richly deserved.
