First, this week’s Pop Quiz question came from Dana Kilcrease in Lagrangeville: Name the Houston Colt .45s pitcher who lost a complete-game no-hitter in 1964 and appeared on the panel show “I’ve Got a Secret” shortly after.
Plenty going on here at the general managers’ meetings, and this is a busy week in baseball even beyond here, as the Baseball Writers Association of America is announcing its award winners this week. Tuesday night, on MLB Network: Managers of the Year.
The Rookies of the Year were announced Monday night, and I always like to share my ballot when it’s proper to do so (in other words, after it has been announced). As you can see here, I voted for AL Rookie as a representative of the Houston chapter. Why the Houston chapter? Because it’s one of the BBWAA’s smallest chapters, and they don’t have enough voting members. Besides, I liked Houston more after I visited it in September (when the Yankees played there) and ate at Uchi.
Here’s my ballot, with brief explanations:
1. Wil Myers, Tampa Bay. Let’s start by noting the obvious: This was an underwhelming field. None of the top candidates had either the 502 plate appearances necessary to qualify for the batting title or the 162 innings pitched required to qualify for the ERA title. So I was working within those parameters.
If I had done this strictly on WAR, then my winner would have been David Lough from Kansas City. But I wasn’t comfortable making that choice. It’s not like Lough had a huge lead in WAR — 5.1 to 4.4 over Myers, if you use both the Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs calculations — and Myers’ offensive contributions significantly overshadowed Lough’s.
So I went with Myers because of his .831 OPS — an outstanding 132 OPS+, because he played half of his home games at pitcher-friendly Tropicana Field — and that was pretty much that.
2. Jose Iglesias, Detroit. No, I didn’t put Lough second, either. It was a close call. I’m not sure I ever feel supremely confident about distinguishing every place from one another on a ballot.
Iglesias got my second-place vote because he combined superb defense with a .349 on-base percentage — overall, he had a 101 OPS+ — to give the Red Sox and then the Tigers value on both sides of the ball.
3. David Lough, Kansas City. So here he was; no one else gave him a vote. His offensive numbers weren’t much, but his defense in right field graded very strongly. I chose him over the guy who finished third, Tampa Bay’s Chris Archer, because Archer didn’t grade very highly on the FanGraphs scale and the strikeouts-to-walks ratio wasn’t great. The other guys who received votes — Oakland’s Dan Straily, the Angels’ J.B. Shuck, Cleveland’s Cody Allen and Texas’ Martin Perez — weren’t as valuable as was Lough, in my opinion.
The Pop Quiz answer is Ken Johnson. If you have a tidbit that correlates baseball to popular culture, please send it to me.