So executive awards work like gold gloves. Beane gets a win for a book published 15 years ago.

How could the brewers not win this? Great trades, use of analytics, good drafting

Huh. I guess Billy Beane should have written that book after all.

Stearns got second place. It his the first year of the award and I'm sure a lot of people were looking at many many years. Plus Beane turned the A's around by 22 games and he did so on a much smaller budget. Stearns improved a good team by 10 games so there is justification in terms of simply looking at 1 year.

3. It’s all about the winning for me. Those points are good but the brewers came one game from the WS. That type of thing weighs heavier for me. Now if this voting was done on regular season work only. It makes more sense but why would an award like this ignore the most important part of season.

Every single award is always done before the playoff. Always has been that way.

Now if this voting was done on regular season work only. It makes more sense but why would an award like this ignore the most important part of season.

All of MLB's official awards are based on regular season work only. MVP and Cy Young ballots are due the last day of the regular season.

It makes more sense but why would an award like this ignore the most important part of season.

Because, as Beane himself has repeatedly noted, there is pretty much nothing an executive can do that would make the playoffs anything other than a crapshoot.

That seems increasingly false. While executives cannot make significant personnel moves in the playoffs, they are more and more responsible for what the managers get up to, and as managering becomes more widespread, watching the games in October can also give us insight into how cleverly the teams were constructed.

Because, as Beane himself has repeatedly noted, there is pretty much nothing an executive can do that would make the playoffs anything other than a crapshoot.

Wasn't the argument that the Dodgers front office was telling the manager which pitchers he could and couldn't use in the WS? So I guess executives can make a team worse in the playoffs, at least.

I guess I'm skeptical that there is or will be enough consistent data to establish causality between certain strategies for clever construction or front office-ordered managering and winning in short series. Pretty much everything we've seen thus far is ex post facto reasoning based on one or two teams' success or failure. But I suppose it could happen that patterns will emerge around a particular mix of players or set of tactics.

It's true, and the vagaries of small samples will overwhelm whatever tiny edges the teams have gained. The Dodgers have the most flexible lineup in baseball, but they looked hella stupid in the WS because nobody hit. They easily could have looked like geniuses had a few bounces gone their way.

I'm just saying stuff.

There are all these awards for excellence, the folks on the low end of their respective totem polls need some recognition. How about:

Derek Jeter wins the inaugural Jeffrey Loria Award.
The first ever Bill Bergen Award goes to Chris Davis.
Manny Machado takes home the A.J. Pierzinski Award for Unsportsmanlike Conduct.

It makes more sense but why would an award like this ignore the most important part of season.

It doesn't ignore the most important part of the season. It fully reflects the regular season, which is the most important part.

The “playoffs are a crapshoot” days are over imo. The good teams are pouring on the resources to make sure they get to the WS now. It was pretty obvious that the Astros last year and Astros/Red Sox this year we’re going to the WS. Dodgers, while not as good as either of the AL teams, were the class of the NL. One common thread is that all these teams really bulked up to avoid the crapshoot theory. Nothing is certain of course but these execs took a lot of risk off the table for those teams

This will make many people here rather happy….

Backlasher must be thrilled!!!

The "crapshoot" theory is misunderstood (possibly by Beane too). First, the term crapshoot does not imply 50/50 -- it implies heavy uncertainty but "coin toss" is 50/50.

Second, the short series works in favor of the favored team (most of the time). Even ignoring any home field advantage (and assuming independence of events), a team with a 55% chance of winning each single game has a 60% chance of winning a 5- or 7-game series. But you're facing off against other good teams -- maybe in the first round, the Red Sox had a better than 55% chance in each game (I suspect the Astros did), but by Red Sox-Astros, it had to be about 50/50, maybe back up to 55% against the Dodgers.

But of course, no matter how good or dominant you are, your chances of winning the WS conditional on making the playoffs never reaches even 50%. Even if the Red Sox had a 70% chance of winning each series, that's less than a 35% chance of winning all three. If you stick a 50/50 against the Astros in the middle of that, the chances fall to a bit under 25%.

So sure, (setting aside the play-in game), teams don't start the postseason with equal 12.5% chances of winning the WS but that 25% is probably the realistic (non-50s Yanks) upper end of what a GM can achieve. That's a 70/70/50 combo or a 70/60/55 combo or better than 60/60/60. So 25% is "achievable" and clearly a lot better than 12.5% much less the Indians' 5% (or whatever) but it's still a 75% chance you don't win the WS and at least a 50% chance you don't make it (more likely nearly 2/3). And of course that's all assuming that you've successfully navigated the regular season, made some good pickups along the way and arrived at the postseason reasonably healthy.

Anyway, the chances that a playoff team has anything like a 25% chance of winning the WS but didn't win 100+ regular season games must be close to zero. Further, the chances that any team that won 100+ is somehow poorly constructed for playoff success also seem very low (health issues aside). As such, basing an award like this on regular season success is reasonable and post-season success would rarely provide any useful additional information. For the Brewers -- they barely eked out the best record in the NL, beat a mediocre Rox team, barely lost to a probably slightly superior Dodgers team ... those last two outcomes are pretty much what we'd expect based on 96 wins.

The “playoffs are a crapshoot” days are over imo. The good teams are pouring on the resources to make sure they get to the WS now. It was pretty obvious that the Astros last year and Astros/Red Sox this year we’re going to the WS. Dodgers, while not as good as either of the AL teams, were the class of the NL. One common thread is that all these teams really bulked up to avoid the crapshoot theory. Nothing is certain of course but these execs took a lot of risk off the table for those teams

I have no idea what actual data you're basing this on. Why was it obvious that the Astros and Red Sox were going to the WS? Why where the Dodgers the "class of the NL," and how does that mean that they're sure to succeed in a short series? What do you mean by "bulked up," and how do you know it took a lot of risk off the table?

I feel pretty confident saying with something like 80% certainty that the Warriors will make the finals. I think the odds of the best regular season MLB team making the world series are something like 33%. It's not a straight coin flip, but you will always take the field over the favorite in baseball.