Idiots Write About Sports

If the value of a day can be measured by the simple question “Will you go to bed tonight knowing something that you didn’t know when you woke up this morning?” then today was certainly a valuable day for me. Because tonight I’m hitting the hay armed with knowledge I didn’t have just 16 hours ago — namely, that baseball’s Most Valuable Player is named after Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

I didn’t claim it was something worthwhile like a mathematical formula or an economics theory or the recipe for Secret Sauce. But it’s something.

Don’t believe me? It’s mentioned here as well as in the second paragraph of this Jim Caple column. And if you can’t trust Jim Caple, who can you trust?

Hey, maybe you knew that it’s officially the Kennesaw Mountain Landis Most Valuable Player, but I sure didn’t, and I tend to know about these things. In my defense, it’s not like “Landis Award” is really a common part of the parlance. “Hey, A-Rod won his second Landis Award today!” “Has there ever been a more undeserving multi-Landis Award-winner than Juan Gonzalez?” “Does it bug anyone else that the Landis Award, baseball’s most prestigious individual award, is named after the guy who did his damnedest to keep baseball segregated?” You know… that sort of thing.

Unlike hockey, which has no less than a billion names for each of its awards, baseball has a spotty record when it comes to naming its awards. The Rookie of the Year Trophy is named after Jackie Robinson, but very few news articles made any mention of that fact when Huston Street and Ryan Howard picked up their hardware last week. A few years back, baseball created the Hank Aaron Award, which honors the leagues’ best hitters based on a convoluted mishmash of point formulas and fan balloting. This is not to be confused with the Ted Williams Awards, which used to go to the leagues’ best hitters, but now gets handed out to the most valuable player at the All Star Game. And of course, there’s the Cy Young Award, which is named after pitching great Christy Mathewson.

Just seeing if you’re still paying close attention.

But the other awards — they don’t need no steenkin’ names, apparently. The honors for the top relief pitcher apparently have dueling corporate sponsors — the ever familiar Rolaids Relief Award and the newly created (and horribly named) DHL Delivery Man of the Year — but no player name like the Eckersley Trophy or the Fingers Cup. The Comeback Player of the Year suffers the ultimate indignantly — not only must he accept an award that basically says, “Hoo boy, did you suck the previous season,” but the trophy is now stamped with the impritaur of an erectile dysfunction product.

Of all the awards baseball hands out, I am shocked that the Manager of the Year trophy has no name slapped on it. Surely, there are no shortage of candidates, from skippers who shuffled off their mortal coil during the prime of their careers (Miller Huggins, Gil Hodges) to those who are generally regarded among the games’ greats (Casey Stengel, Connie Mack, Joe McCarthy). The vote here would be to rename it the Stengel Award, since calling it the Joe McCarthy Award makes it sound like we’re recognizing achievements in management and red-baiting. But I could be persuaded otherwise.

Or, for all I know, the Manager of the Year Award already has a name. Something for me to learn tomorrow, I guess.

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