Ron Gardenhire won the AL Manager of the Year Award pretty easily, a well-deserved accolade for a guy who just simply wins with whatever he’s given. In the NL, however, Bud Black edged out Dusty Baker by a single point. That’s crazy.
Voters list three managers on their ballots, with the first-place vote worth five points, second worth three and third worth one. I wonder if the voters think about the point tabulation or just consider the order of the names. Obviously, a first-place vote indicates who that writer thinks deserves the award. But how much thought goes into second vs. third place? I’m curious because had one of the two voters who listed Dusty Baker third decided to put him second, the award would belong to Cincinnati’s skipper.
As for the order of finish, it’s pretty much how I would’ve listed them:






And one last tidbit about Black: He becomes just the second former pitcher to win Manager of the Year, and he had a much longer Major League career (398 games) than Tommy Lasorda (26 games) did.
I still would have liked to see Washington win the award in the AL. I hear so much about how he was in the weakest division and had the most to work with, but I still feel that a team with that budget got above-expected performance out of C.J. Wilson & Colby Lewis. He had to have had a hand in that.
He also had a much smaller budget with which to work. I guess the manager really has no control in the budget, but it is emblematic of something that the Twins were around 100M and the Rangers were in the 60M range this season.
I guess you could say that Washington got luckier with less (rookie closer, dismal division, escape from bad injuries). But Gardy I don’t think that’s a reason to factor in previous seasons of not winning the award for Gardy.
I wonder if the results change if there’s the opportunity to vote after the playoffs. I would hope Washington would be a shoe in after the Yankees swept passed the Twins, and the Rangers made it all the way to the World Series. But even before that, I think Washington did plenty to win the award.
Very good points. I suppose I was a little surprised at Gardy winning the AL award — and I’m not a fan of factoring in past performance, either — but the fact that the NL vote was so close really intrigued me, so I haven’t really thought much about the AL vote.