WTF. What the hell does Whicker think Law and Carroll do for a living?

Coming from the a$$hat who wrote so distastefully about Jaycee Dugard, this is really something.

Thank God he, you know, got his priorities straight.

uggh, yes Law and Carroll had a controversial vote on one name out of three on their ballot, but the argument about wins is ridiculous. We aren't talking about a 23 win pitcher getting beat out by a 14 win guy, we are talking about the winner who had 15 wins vs Haren who had 14 and Vazquez who had 15.... I'm not seeing a massive failure based upon disrespect for wins from Carroll or Law.... I mean Lincecum the winner by traditional voters only had 15 wins.

Beyond the fact that Law and Carroll aren’t daily on-site baseball writers, the disregard for a pitcher’s win total is a little disquieting when you think about 1968.

And then he goes on to talk about Denny McClain winning 30 games and a unanimous Cy Young Award in 1968. What the heck does 1968 have to do with the vote this year? It's not like anybody this year could approach 30 wins.

Is this another "lapse of professionalism" or just the norm?

McLain did deserve the CY in '68, but not by a huge margin: he only out-VORPed Luis Tiant 65.3 to 62.3. McLain's strength (and the reason he was able to get 31 wins) was that he racked up 41 starts and 336 IP because he got balls in play and had the lowest BB/9 in the AL. He was 4th in ERA. He'd win again with today's voters but it wouldn't be the slam dunk Whicker implies it should be.

Get out of your cave, Whicker...the stone age is over.

How many of those voters have actually been paid by a Major League Baseball team to evaluate players?

Speaking of Jaycee Dugard, a blog got in touch with Dugard after the Whicker column, and she responded.

Speaking of Jaycee Dugard, a blog got in touch with Dugard after the Whicker column, and she responded.


I feel bad laughing at that.

I am a horrible person.

i join Tripon and JJ in being a horrible person.

So Whicker is the ass that wrote, quite possibly the worse article in history and has the audacity to question someones else's argument?

I remember that the first time it was posted. And I said then that it's hard to see how that #######'s use of Dugard's experiences for laughs is really any better than Whicker's.

Whicker didn't leave the yard with this opinion. Sad to see he still has a job as a writer.

Some writers use incredibly specific, dumb criteria when voting for awards like this, such as whether the pitcher in question was nice to the writer's 5-year-old son at one game or something. Take Law's and Neyer's opinions about wins out of the discussion for a second - I don't think it's out of bounds to take a not-generally-accepted thing extremely seriously while voting. That's why such a large number of writers vote.

Mark Whicker's first edit of this column:

It doesn't seem like the victims of 9/11 got to track the massive changes in Cy Young voting that have taken place over the last ten years, but I think they could appreciate them as I'm sure they appreciated the massive architectural changes they witnessed in their daily workplaces as they crashed down around them in a fiery inferno.

In fact, there are many strange coincidences, for example, under the old voting approach, wins after 9/11 would be "pennant race wins" and merit more weight in Cy Young voting. This year, in what I'm sure many victims of 9/11 would see as an affront to their dignity, Tim Lincecum won despite his post 9/11 record being hijacked by mediocrity at a terror inducing "2-2".

Also, I think he might be Muslim or from one of those other Asian countries.