OT: Silver Slugger Winners Announced
The Silver Slugger winners were announced today (well yesterday as it's after 1 AM).
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4650030
This would be utterly unremarkable, except for the whopping 6/8 players eligible in the AL awarded both a Silver Slugger and a Gold Glove. And of course, this includes three of the people who clearly did not deserve a Gold Glove (and cases can be made against others, such as Torii Hunter and Ichiro), namely Mark Texiera, Derek Jeter, and Joe Mauer. Interestingly, this trend does not carry on to the NL, where 2/9 eligible players won both awards.
To be clear, this correlation in the AL is highly unusual. Usually, only 1-2 players per league win both awards in the same year.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:34 AM ^
While I agree with your assessment that it was a strange year and that Jeter and Mauer were bad choices, I've got to disagree with your opinion that Teixeira "clearly did not deserve a Gold Glove." If you watched him play everyday this year, there was nobody better than him (I don't care what the numbers say, defensive metrics suck). He took a mediocre defensive infield and turned it into one of the best in baseball this year with his sure hands around the bag. He makes every play at first. I'm a Tigers fan who spent the summer working in NYC and got to see a lot of Yankees games. I also watched a lot of baseball on MLB.tv over the summer. I didn't see a better defensive first baseman in the league.