This Week in (Dumb) Baseball: MLB awards season edition – CBSSports.com

It’s Monday, which means our regularly scheduled programming of This Week in (Dumb) Baseball is ready for consumption.

As regular readers already know, this feature has the title, sure, but it’s mostly for fun— a fact that eludes the masses but remains the case. For example, if you tell me to “quit whining,” you are missing the point. I’m mostly chuckling to myself as I write these things (with some exceptions, of course).

For all This Week in (Dumb) Baseball columns, click here.

1. Remember, these are regular season awards

The BBWAA awards are set to roll out this week and with those comes complaining. Thanks to myriad new-school platforms (Internet comment sections, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) we get to see more complaining than back in the good ol’ days.

Let’s just make sure the complaining is on point. The most misguided complaints generally stem from the inclusion of the postseason in arguments.

First of all, these are regular season awards. There are postseason awards and the Royals just got the most important award in baseball: The World Series trophy. Everything else is minor compared to that. There’s a reasonable case to be made that Manager of the Year should include postseason (Grant Brisbee did an excellent job making that case last year), but otherwise we shouldn’t spend a solitary second discussing the postseason when it comes to the awards.

Why not? Because the voters don’t get to do that. Ballots are due before the postseason even started. For all the voters knew, the Pirates and Yankees were going to square off in the World Series.

Please, please, please leave the postseason results out of your awards arguments.

2. My stats are better than yours

Here’s the other pet peeve. We’re about to see a steel-cage-level battle over which stats mean the most. The dirty little secret: For many people, they decided first which player/manager they like and then zeroed in on cherry-picked stats to justify the selection.

For example: Lots of people hate Bryce Harper. Don’t worry about the reasons (though most are stupid) because it’s a simple fact. These people will find ways to spin Harper winning the NL MVP — and he will — being some sort of joke. We’ll hear about RBI, his team not making the playoffs, Jonathan Papelbon deciding to choke him in the dugout or a laundry list of other reasons why he shouldn’t have won. The bottom line is all these arguments will boil down to the aforementioned simple fact that the people making the argument just don’t like Bryce Harper.

And you know what? That’s cool. It’s your right. Just be mature enough to own it.

It’s not just Harper, though. It’ll be about Kris Bryant‘s strikeouts or Mike Trout‘s lack of RBI or stupid things that can’t be measured (“team player!” “leadership!”) or — the dumbest argument ever — “media bias.”

Aside: The media collectively doesn’t have regional bias in the BBWAA votes. It can’t because the votes are equally spread out to writers in every market. This isn’t me defending a vote I’m a part of because — while I’m a first-year BBWAA member — I didn’t have a vote this year. It’s just me presenting a simple fact. When the Kansas City chapter has the same number of votes as New York in the AL, you can’t cry about regional bias.

Newsflash: Sometimes people disagree with us on things and it’s not because of bias or stupidity or using the wrong stats. Sometimes it’s just an honest disagreement. This doesn’t make someone a bad person. It’s life. Or as The Dude might say, “yeah well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

And now, let us wash away the dumb with fun!

Happy Birthday: Dwight Gooden

In honor of Doc’s 51st birthday, here’s our baseball card of the day

And now our throwback highlight of the day. Gooden striking out the side in the 1984 All-Star Game:

Possibly dumb pop culture rankings of the week

Movies I want to see this holiday season …

1. Star Wars VII – The Force Awakens
2. Creed
3. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2

4-100. Everything else

Man, what a trio of movies hitting theaters within the next few months. It makes for a fun offseason, in addition obviously to MLB’s stacked free agent class.

On that note, it’s time to put a bow on this thing. Have a good week, friends.

Suggestions (dumb stuff, random videos, baseball cards, pop culture rankings topics, etc.) or hate mail? Feel free to hit me up: matt.snyder@cbs.com or you could always go to Twitter (@MattSnyderCBS).