FanPost

Twins take home virtual hardware

The results of the Internet Baseball Awards (IBA) have been announced.  All told, the Twins did pretty well, and I think the voting was pretty fair.

Santana won the Cy Young vote by a ridiculous margin, getting over 96% of the first-place votes.  

Mauer came in second in MVP voting to Jeter, who had a legitimately great season this year.  Santana finished third in the voting, and Morneau finished sixth.  It's interesting, that internet-land was just as divided in opinion over who the Twins' MVP was as Twins fans are.  259 first-place votes for Mauer, 252 first-place votes for Santana, and 100 first-place votes for Morneau.  Added together, the Twins got more first-place MVP votes than any other team.

In a result that certainly surprised me, Francisco Liriano took home the ROY honors, though the vote certainly was close.  You can definitely make an argument that Liriano was so great when he was pitching that he was more valuable than the other rookies who were merely very, very good.  I wouldn't have suspected that many people to take that side, though, especially considering Joel Zumaya's shiny fastball, but there it is.

And Gardy even took second in the AL MOY voting, though he wasn't close to Leyland (who won) at all.  It probably goes without saying at this point that I wouldn't rate him quite that high, but when all the dust settles, Gardy's probably in the top half of AL managers, and it's difficult to say how Gardy's replacement might do if the Twins decided to jettison Mr. Gardenhire.  So there's your backhanded compliment of the day.

Overall, I'd say at this point I care more about the IBA voting than the BBWAA voting.  It's mainly a large numbers thing.  That is, I think that having a lot more pretty well-informed voters is better than having a few very well-informed voters, and sometimes I really wonder how well-informed some of the BBWAA are in the first place.

More than anything, though, it's nice to see the Twins' stars get some recognition.