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Rob Neyer of Baseball Nation does his best to try to reach some justification for a first-place Cy Young vote for a reliever: Making the case for closers as Cy Young candidates, in 9 easy steps - Baseball Nation
As things stand now, a relief pitcher has a fighting chance for the Cy Young Award only if he's nearly perfect and there isn't a starting pitcher with 20 wins and a low ERA. Which is probably as it should be.
Dave Cameron of FanGraphs does not think that the Trout/Cabrera MVP debate is a war on WAR: Tonight Is Not a War on WAR | FanGraphs Baseball
While WAR has become the symbol for the pro-Trout argument, at the end of the day, this is really the same argument that has been going on for 20 or 30 years. If the Tigers hadn’t made the playoffs, or Cabrera hadn’t led the league in runs batted in, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. This entire discussion is about the validity of those specific points, and those two points have been at the heart of nearly every MVP argument since. The names change, but the discussion remains the same.
Jonah Keri of Grantland thinks that Jeffrey Loria is a genius: There's Shrewd, There's Genius, Then There's Marlins Owner Jeffrey Loria - The Triangle Blog - Grantland
I don't blame him for any of this. I'm just impressed by how well he worked everything to his advantage, taking advantage of elected officials, short-sighted businessmen, and a system that rewards the kind of behavior that might seem despicable but is impossibly profitable. When it comes to Jeffrey Loria, I'm just in awe.
Jason Wojciechowski of Baseball Prospectus analyzes expectations and the manager of the year award: Baseball Prospectus | In A Pickle: Managing Expectations
If Josh Hamilton and Zack Greinke sign with the Astros this offseason, there's no projection system that would posit that that's enough to make them a playoff team. If you add (e.g.) 10 WARP to a team with a 60-win core, you get a 70-win team, but you don't get a playoff team, as I suspect many fans and writers would hope/believe based on the motion on the roster. This is not something I brilliantly made up just now, of course, and it's also not something that I can prove exists, but I have a hunch that it tickles many of you in a particular brain-spot that indicates that you also have a feeling that fans and analysts and writers are fooled by this type of bias.