Is it still baseball season? Didn't the World Series end two weeks ago?
Why then, one must ask, are Major League Baseball's regular season awards just now being announced? The sport is over, done, finished and yet it keeps trying to climb back into the news.
The Cy Young awards were announced in the last two days and the league MVPs will not be awarded until next Monday. Never mind that player movement has already started, but the choice to release these awards this late lowers their importance and value in the public eye and is ultimately detrimental to Major League Baseball.
First of all, the awards are for the regular season. The ballots are not cast during or after the playoffs because that would open up voters to the influences of post season play.
Is it that hard to count the votes and present awards during the first round of the playoffs? Probably not.
The timing of the announcement removes much of the meaning since many sports fans have moved on to other sports.
Between football and the start of basketball, there is not much space to discuss the winners.
Baseball Tonight is no longer a daily primetime fixture. The fans are being robbed of one of the best aspects of regular season awards, arguing about who deserved the honor.
Were Geovany Soto's 23 home runs really more impressive than Edinson Volquez's 17 wins and 206 strikeouts? Do Brandon Webb's 22 merit the Cy Young which Tim Lincecum received?
Instead the discussion is nearly muted because, well, the season is over.
The worst part of this plan is that MLB could give itself a tremendous boost in interest entering the postseason, but instead wastes that opportunity. Coming after a calamitous fall in playoff television ratings, it is ridiculous that baseball's management is not doing more to raise interest.
The best examples of award intrigue can be found in several important NBA seasons. Entering a 1995 playoff series against Hakeem Olajuwon and the Houston Rockets, the San Antonio Spur's David Robinson was awarded the league MVP, an honor Olajuwon felt he deserved.
All Olajuwon did after that was dismantle, humiliate and basically annihilate Robinson, on the way to a second consecutive NBA title.
Similarly, Michael Jordan twice faced opponents who had won MVP's he felt he deserved in the finals. He took that, used it as motivation and was a dominant force, triumphing both times.
Now, it's not just that players like Olajuwon and Jordan were great, or that they found motivation in being slighted. These stories pushed those series to a more mythic and entertaining level.
The narrative of a talented athlete turning their seething anger into on-field excellence and domination is something people want to watch.
Instead, baseball avoids this whole idea of awards generating excitement. They allow leading Cy Young candidate"" to fill in for the more meaningful term ""Cy Young winner.""
We could remember the entertaining tales of the MVP leading his team to the World Series (Barry Bonds in 2003) and the ineffective performances of players deemed the league's best (Alex Rodriguez in 2007) could be dissected and enjoyed more by fans.
The irony of a team with the top pitcher and hitter in their league losing in the first round of the playoffs (2006 Twins and 2002 A's please take a bow) just loses some of its bite when you don't know the award winners until November.
If they were given out in the first week of the playoffs, the baseball awards could add compelling subplots to the already rich story that is a baseball season. Now they serve as a bland afterthought, thrown in at the end of the narrative because they are simply expected more than really needed.
Want the Heisman trophy to come out after the national title game and the NFL MVP to be announced in February? Tell Ben at breiner@wisc.edu.
