MLB Awards Week Coverage
Yesterday at 09:00 AM
Next up: Cy Young Award
Here we go, it's Awards announcement week! And I will do my best to cover that. The next major award announcement is the Cy Young Award.
Until then, let's take a look at the best AL and NL pitcher in each of these statistics:
fWAR: Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal
total IP: Logan Gilbert and Logan Webb
K/9: Chris Sale and Cole Ragans; honorable mention to Sonny Gray, #2 overall to Sale! and to Jack Flaherty who was also ahead of Ragans.
ERA & xERA: Skubal and Sale
FIP: Skubal and Sale
xFIP: Skubal and Sale (and another honorable mention for Sonny Gray! he had a really impressive season)
LOB%: Ronel Blanco and Jack Flaherty (who had a sneaky good season in 2024)
I think it's pretty clear that the Cy Young Award winners should be Tarik Skubal in the American League and Chris Sale in the National League! I suppose there are other opinions out there but it seems pretty clear cut to me. Especially since both pitchers met the requirements for the pitching triple crown!
The Cy Young Award winners will be announced on November 20th at 5pm CST.
Then on November 21st the two MVPs will be announced, and in an even more undoubtable situation we should see Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani as AL and NL MVP.
November 22nd we will see the Heart and Hustle Awards which should probably be for players like Aaron Miles, Rex Hudler, and Bo Hart but it probably is something else entirely.
And that will wrap up Awards Season for 2024.
Already Announced Awards
November the 18th the Rookie of the Year Awards were announced and the prognosticators got fancy with it this year and decided to hand out the RoY Awards to two starting pitchers: Luis Gil (AL) and Paul Skenes (NL). I think Jackson Merrill should clearly have gotten the NL award over Skenes, so I scoff at this a little bit. Jackson Merrill was the most valuable player of the Padres, a team stacked with way above average talent. And he did this as a rookie! Astonishing. And Austin Wells should clearly have won the AL rookie of the year over Gil.
November the 14thhttps://www.mlb.com/news/2024-all-mlb-teams were announced. Think of it as an All-MLB All Star Team, voted on after the season instead of in the middle of it like in the All Star Game voting. There is also a Second Team, which because, I don't know. I didn't even know this existed but I guess it happened before already. Cool, I guess? Seems like it would be more fun to select All Star teams for each league again, after the season, and design a game by MLB that uses the stats in all star game simulations, or whatever. Make it fun.
The Padres had the most players on the All-MLB teams. And one Cardinal made the All-MLB first team! I bet you know who that is. He also won an award listed below.
Also on the 14th, the Hank Aaron Award was announced, and that went to Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Which should be a preview of the MVP announcements.
The Rivera/Hoffman Reliever of the Year Awards went out to Ryan Helsley and Emmanuel Clase! So I guess there is an award for relievers now, that is pretty cool actually, also back on the 14th of November.
The Outstanding DH Award went to Shohei. Another award I didn't know about until this article!
Comeback Player of the Year Awards rightly went to Chris Sale and Garrett Crochet.
Ok that's enough awards! There were also Silver Slugger, Platinum Gloves, Executive of the Year (Matt Arnold of the Brewers won it), the Gold Glove Awards by Rawlings, and the esteemed Roberto Clemente Award, which went to Salvador Perez of Kansas City.
In other news, Brant Brown is our new hitting coach. He just so happens to be neighbors to Nolan Gorman, and Brown already started calling young Cardinal hitters weeks ago to introduce himself. Brant Brown drops some dark humor about surviving bachelor parties in this article. So Gorman has a head start on the new coaching philosophy in the hitting department. Brant Brown sounds like a character in this article and that should shake things up at least. And Skip Schumaker recommended him, which means apparently that Skip is still very much in communication with the Cardinals org.
So there you have it, I am very much in disagreement with the Rookie of the Year picks, but I guess they're just going to randomly give it to starting pitchers this year, like Rookie Cy Young of the Years Awards. And I think this is one of the most completely obvious years on who should win the Cy Young and MVP Awards that anything off script on this one will seem like total negligence or bias.
Album Hall of Fame
In this little corner of VEB I am inducting an album that I have listened to many times, enough that I have realized it is a perfect album, with no skippable tracks. It just doesn't get old for me, has magical production that suits the band or other sonic material, and has that x-factor that keeps you coming back to listen again and again.
Here are the inductees so far:
- John Coltrane - 'Giant Steps'
- Meat Beat Manifesto - 'Subliminal Sandwich'
- JJ Doom - 'Key to the Kuffs'
- Mr Bungle - selt-titled
- Thingy - 'Songs About Angels, Evil, and Running Around On Fire'
This week the inductee is a record that I used to have on hand at most of my DJ outings back when I lived in Chicago (and Rock Island, IL). If there was one record that I found could bring strangers up asking what it is, it is this one.
I first heard about this album in some article about proto funk rock, when I was researching hybrid genres of music on the internet. I was able to hear this hard to find masterpiece through the wonders of youtube, and I became so infatuated with the sounds of this album that I ordered it on vinyl. All-Music describes 'Afreaka!' as "a wild mash of Afro-Latin funk, breakbeats, tripped-out soul, jazz fusion, and psychedelic journeying."
It is an album that you simply must hear and I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially if you enjoy the sounds of the early 1970s. Two songs which may be good intro points are "Hymn to Mother Earth" and their version of "I Put A Spell On You" which is every bit as good as CCR's version. However, I encourage you to just listen from start to finish. You will hear a full album of musicians including an incredible bassist and Hammond B-3 organist playing just about every style of music fused into something new. Despite its new form of music, it is truly a timeless classic that still sounds fresh and new today, except for the vintage production which just gives it even more mystique.
This album is early funk, early jazz fusion, and it's own thing that just rocks in such a way that was a nice departure for the post 1960s psychedelic rock scenes. It has a certain immediacy and call for justice that is almost punk rock or political in spirit. If you would like to know more about the band, this interview is a wonderful read into music history that you've never heard of. The band was a group of migrant musical geniuses, or should I say musical sponges that were around all varieties of music traveling from various parts of the world to the UK. The idea of the band was actually formed in Morocco along the way, but also incorporates sounds of the Caribbean and all that was happening in world culture at that time.
So there you have it for this week, thank you for reading about some baseball awards, and thank you for listening if you want to check out some new music. At some point I'll start putting together a playlist. Keep that hot stove going.
