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1. cardsfanboy*Some of the few which most general fans know? The Heisman Trophy, the Stanley Cup and the Ryder Cup. However, most of us don't know diddly about John Heisman or Frederick Stanley or Samuel Ryder.
A. The best hitter in each league.
B. NBA Finals MVP.
C. The best college quarterback.
D. Top NHL goalie.
E. NHL points leader in regular season.
(Unless Cy Young killed some people we never knew about. Then maybe you could justify it. Woulda been interesting to see what would have happened if O.J. were convicted on the murder charge. Anyway.)
I actually had no idea that the NBA Finals MVP award was named for anybody, just like the Jackie Robinson Award in baseball. Pretty much everybody knows it as the Rookie of the Year award. I wonder why the "Pitcher of the Year" award is always referred to by the player's name but the Rookie of the Year award almost never is.
Or making every team retire Jackie Robinson's number.
Retiring 42 throughout baseball is a genuine gesture of how important Jackie was to all of MLB, not just the Dodgers. Nobody gets to wear it after Rivera retires, it doesn't lead to confusing, it honors the man's contribution without making a joke of the game. There's nothing wrong with it.
agree (at least about the first part, I lean mostly pro-42 uniform but I understand the other side of the argument) I mean Satchel Paiges name should be known by pretty much anyone who can name great ballplayers and remember Stan Musial name. I'm having a discussion on another board about best catcher of all time and I have to qualify whether to include Josh Gibson or not and some of the relatively informed posters over there didn't know who he was.
data needs to come out, MLE's need to be created, stories need to be told etc. but doing something like this would just be stupid. (or bowing down to the political correctness behemoth)
I probably wouldn't say it this strongly, but I agree. Changing the name of the Cy Young award would be an insult to Cy Young, whether intended as one or not.
The unintended irony in this statement is priceless.
Agree on both counts.
Moreover, I really don't like the tone of this, from TFA:
The very fact that Young "began his career in the horse-and-buggy age" is something that should motivate us to work hard to preserve his memory. Indeed, I strongly believe that despite the fact that his name is on the award, he's generally overlooked and underappreciated today.
An excerpt from an article I wrote several years ago:
.
Do we know where Cy was when Ed Delahanty fell off that train?
I don't particularly care either way, but it always amuses me to hear of how something is an "insult" to a dead person.
Or conversely, an "honor" for a dead person.
Retiring 42 throughout baseball is a genuine gesture of how important Jackie was to all of MLB, not just the Dodgers. Nobody gets to wear it after Rivera retires, it doesn't lead to confusing, it honors the man's contribution without making a joke of the game. There's nothing wrong with it.
Ultimately I don't see it as a big deal, but I find it rather empty and trite. We're baseball, we really care, so here's a league-wide retired number.
I admit I'm a little tired of the Jackie Robinson deification. Not that he wasn't a great man and a great ballplayer but I feel like the issue of civil rights and sport has become too tied up in Jackie and Muhammad Ali and it risks belittling the accomplishments of everyone else (also known as the Larry Doby Theory) and I get a feeling that MLB celebrates Jackie Robinson because it looks good. Where is the love for Willard Brown or Hank Thompson or Pumpsie Green? It would actually be a far cooler idea to ask each of the original sixteen franchises to retire the number of the player who integrated their team.
It's also opened Pandora's Box as the NHL has retired Gretzky's number, Hispanic groups are advocating Roberto Clemente's retired number and people suggested the NFL retire Pat Tillman's number.
Lastly, something else that bothers me is now that Robinson's number is retired no current player can wear the number, which means no current player can actually wear the number in tribute to Jackie. Mo Vaughn is the most prominent example I can think of but undoubtedly there were more players who have done it. There should be a special dispensation for players to wear the number in tribute of Robinson.
Admittedly everybody wearing Robinson's number is ten times dumber than retiring it across the game.
Butch Huskey, I believe.
Even if Paige was a better pitcher, Young did it first, right? I mean, if Barack Obama turns out to be the best president ever or something, will anyone clamor for President's Day to be moved to Obama's birthday?
Yet hardly anyone knows that is even plausible, while most baseball fans have heard of Satchel Paige.
So by this logic, shouldn't we make it the "Smokey Joe Award"? - which sounds kind of cool, too.
AL - The Ty Cobb Award
NL - The Rajah Award
Combined - The Splinter Award
AL - The Lefty Grove Award
NL - The Warren Spahn Award (changed to The Tom Seaver Award for a few years due to Gaylord Gaynor the neighborhood bully)
Combined - The Rocket Award (originally The Walter Johnson Award...but since these are MY dopey awards...)
Is this true? I don't think I'd ever read about his playing record. How many games did he play a year?
I'm inclined to agree, as mentioned in the Aaron/Ali/Cosby thread.
If I may be indulged to quote another article excerpt:
Chris Cobb's MLEs, from Paige's HOM thread, are 4666 ip, 302-250, 4.00 DERA, 113 DERA+, 336 win shares.
In other words, one hell of a major-league career. He was an easy first-ballot HOMer.
But to think of Paige as superhuman, as many do, is not realistic. He was mythical even in his own day, but he has since come to serve as the emblem of a half-considered idea that Negro League greats were greatly superior to their white contemporaries. Since it's impossible to count all his barnstorming wins and strikeouts, they take on a Paul-Bunyan quality in the retelling.
If he'd been born white in 1867, Paige might have won 400 games – one can't rule that out. Would he have won 500? All we know is that tons of guys have pitched in the major leagues, at both 50' and 60'6", and aside from Young and Walter Johnson nobody has won even 400 games.
This. (ooh I'm so hip)
There's a line between genuinely and appropriately celebrating and honoring a great historical figure, and deifying him, and much of the Paige foo-rah has tended to go way over that line. Paige's very clever self-promotional skill did much to contribute to it, of course.
To have that many wins and losses is remarkable. Does anyone else come close to Cy Young's loss record?
A much better idea would have been for each team to assign # 42 to the player who best exemplifies Jackie Robinson's spirit, and never retire it.
Yes. And this fact makes Young's 511 wins all that much more staggering a feat. His career totals (749 complete games and 7,355 innings along with the 511 wins) are so monumental that practically speaking they're incomprehensible, or at least not fully and properly comprehended.
Of course they're artifacts of the particular conditions of his era; in no other age of baseball history was it feasible for a pitcher to record such totals. But the fact that no other era could have yielded such numbers doesn’t make it inevitable that his era would, and Young's career numbers tower over those of his greatest contemporaries. It’s difficult to imagine any alternative baseball history scenario under which any pitcher could possibly win more than 511 games. One of the most confident statements one can ever make is this: no one else will ever, ever, win as many games as Cy Young.
at least not until they start letting cyborgs into the league.
I agree, but this is as good a place as any to mention that I have an old Thomas Guide that shows the Nixon Freeway.
Rank Player (age) Losses Throws
1. Cy Young+ 316 R
2. Pud Galvin+ 310 R
3. Nolan Ryan+ 292 R
4. Walter Johnson+ 279 R
5. Phil Niekro+ 274 R
6. Gaylord Perry+ 265 R
7. Don Sutton+ 256 R
8. Jack Powell 254 R
9. Eppa Rixey+ 251 L
10. Bert Blyleven 250 R
only Powell and Blyleven are NOT in the Hall of Fame.
Only Powell is not in the Hall of Merit.
Only Jamie Moyer (191) among active pitchers has more than 165 career losses, and only 11 have as many as 115 losses.
Sissies!
Bonds also has the single-highest slugging average in a single season, .8634 (2001), but that award could just as well be named for Babe Ruth, who has the 2nd and 3rd best years in that stat and did so on whiskey, not roids.
Once he retires, I think it would be cool to have an annual Ichiro Suzuki Award for the player in the majors who collected the most hits in that season.
Rickey Henderson, of course, should be the eponym for the season stolen base leader.
I imagine we could come up with a list of 50 awards to give out named after players without doing truly silly ones. (if truly silly 100-200 would be easy)
Most people know what this is? Really?
I think it's either a golf award or a tennis one (one of those country club sports), but if you asked me how you earn it, I wouldn't have a clue.
Edit: Or maybe it's sailing? ####. I have no idea.
No way. Kingman couldn't draw a walk with a pencil.
That sounds like the Rob Deer Award to me.
I wouldn't mind maning each Gold Glove at its position. (If we're lucky, this would end the tradition of giving 3 cf Gold Gloves per league.)
c: The Bench or The Rodriguez
1b: The Hernandez
2b: The Mazeroski or The White
3b: The Robinson
ss: The Smith
lf: Hm. The Crawford, maybe
cf: The Speaker or The Ashburn
rf: No one leaps to mind here, either. The Henrich?
p: The Maddux or The Kaat
I thought it was equestrian.
Clemente
Silly, they'd all be called that.
you're not the only one, that is exactly what I did, and it took me a couple of seconds to realize what Rich was saying before I finally went back and read it real slow.
*Not a euphemism.
That would be the Adam Dunn Award. See here.
that's Lord Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby to you bub!
I mean, if Barack Obama turns out to be the best president ever or something, will anyone clamor for President's Day to be moved to Obama's birthday?
I can't decide if this was intentionally ironic or not. For you young'uns, we used to have Washington's birthday and Lincoln's birthday as holidays. The movement to (rightly) honor Martin Luther King, Jr finally succeeded to create that holiday. But god forbid there should be an additional federal holiday, so Washington and Lincoln's birthdays became the single President's Day.
So President's Day exists by essentially the same logic as the hypothesized Obama Day and Paige Award -- i.e. another great person came along who deserved such an honor and we chose to downplay some previous honoree.
If it will make you happy, I suppose I'd be willing to take off work the 4th of August every year to celebrate Obama. Even if he turns out to be the worst president in history.
Outstanding. But, seriously, it's a pretty famous US versus Europe golf tournament.
Satchel Paige is probably my favorite pitcher of all-time, but this is silly. Few modern fans know who Cy Young is, and he's had the award named after him for forever. Why should we subject Satch to that kind of anonymity?
Perhaps Edes will settle for honoring Paige by changing his own name to Satchel.
It might also make more sense if Cy Young wasn't such a great name to begin with.
In honor of the Marlins' third base coach?
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