If Murray Won't Stop, I Won't Either!

Last week Murray Chass had a wonderful column about how the "Dark Side" was taking over the Cy Young Award.  We promptly made fun of that over here last week but now Murray is at it again!

Speaking of the one-sided outcome of the vote, Rogers added, “I wonder how much of it was bullying on the Internet. There were a lot of columns written in September saying no one should be stupid enough not to vote for Felix. Maybe that’s what happened, but I hope not.” [...]

Winning is still the name of the game, Elliott added, uttering a view I agree with wholeheartedly. “If a general manager has been out of touch for a weekend and comes home,” Elliott added, “he says did we win. He doesn’t ask did the starter have a quality start or strike out 10.”

Tracy Ringolsby, a long-time baseball writer but not a voter in this election, offered a theory about the Hernandez vote,

“It’s the trendy thing to do,” he said, “and everybody wants to be part of the trend.”

In his first column, where he predicted that Felix would win the Cy Young, Chass said that he the development to looking at "new-fangled statistics" and not just wins as a means of voting for the Cy Young Award started last year with Zack Greinke.  But now that it's over and Felix has won he's pulling out the bully card, or at least reporting about someone using the bully card. Weak sauce.

Maybe I'm wrong but the purpose of Chass' original column was to take the high road setting himself up to say "I knew this would happen but I don't agree with it", it's not fair to now claim that Felix won because the writers were bullied, that's just ridiculous. If it were true (the bullying), it would have been obvious at the time Chass wrote his column and he would have noted it.  Chass "predicted" that Price and Sabathia would cancel each other out and Felix could sneak in to win the award.  Obviously that's not how it played out as Felix won in a landslide, and since that was the case Mr. Chass' new conclusion is that writers were either a) bullied or b) trendy.   Apparently the BBWAA has no backbone or opinion of their own and solely has their hand on the pulse of trends going on in baseball.  That's how they now vote.  It can't just be that the majority of people thought Felix was the best pitcher in the league, it has to be because of bullying and trends. Sheesh.

Plus, the "bullying" on the internet, if there was such a  thing, was likely done by bloggers, the bane of Murray Chass' existence.  I say this because if the bloggers convinced the weak minded writers to vote for Felix it means that blogs are influential.  Felix won the Cy Young because the voters thought he was the best pitcher or because blogs carry more weight now.  Even though the latter isn't true it doesn't really matter as in either scenario Murray Chass is wrong.  And that is a good thing.