BBA Announces Walter Johnson Award Winners!

Note: Before checking out the results of the Walter Johnson Award voting, check out my ballot for the award along with the ballot over at Marlins Diehards from fellow BBA bloggers Ted and Dave.

With the two biggest end-of-season BBA awards coming up, I figured it would be good to point out the official results here on Marlin Maniac. Check out the winners in this official press release (my reactions after the jump as well):

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HALLADAY, HERNANDEZ OVERWHEMING WINNERS OF WALTER JOHNSON AWARD

2010 was often referred to as “the year of the pitcher.”  However, not all pitchers are created equal.

The Baseball Bloggers Alliance announced today that Philadelphia’s Roy Halladay was the unanimous selection for the National League Walter Johnson Award, receiving all nineteen first place votes.  In the American League, Seattle’s Felix Hernandez was almost as dominant, garnering all but four of the first place selections from the BBA membership.

Halladay, who came over to Philadelphia in an off-season deal with Toronto, wasted no time getting comfortable in his new league, posting an 2.44 ERA, striking out 219 batters, winning 21 games, and throwing a perfect game to boot.  While only the regular season was considered for voting, he also became only the second player to throw a post-season no-hitter when he faced the Reds in the National League Divisional Series.  Halladay received 133 points, well ahead of the runner up, St. Louis’s Adam Wainwright, who received 66.

Hernandez’s win was statistically more impressive, due to more ballots being cast in the American League and a wider range of pitchers receiving votes.  His 2010 season, where he put up a sparkling 2.27 ERA, a 1.06 WHIP, and struck out 232 in just under 250 innings pitched, led voters to bestow upon him 137 points, with second place being New York’s CC Sabathia, who received three first place votes and 62 points over all.

The complete voting results are as follows (first place votes in parenthesis):

American League
Felix Hernandez, Seattle (18) 137
CC Sabathia, New York (3) 62
David Price, Tampa Bay (1) 57
Cliff Lee, Seattle/Texas 41
Jered Weaver, Los Angeles 22
Jon Lester, Boston 18
Clay Buchholz, Boston 14
Francisco Liriano, Minnesota 13
Trevor Cahill, Oakland 5
Justin Verlander, Detroit 5

National League
Roy Halladay, Philadelphia (19) 133
Adam Wainwright, St. Louis 66
Ubaldo Jimenez, Colorado 52
Josh Johnson, Florida 43
Tim Hudson, Atlanta 16
Tim Lincecum, San Francisco 7
Clayton Kershaw, Los Angeles 2
Mat Latos, San Diego 2
Heath Bell, San Diego 1
Yovani Gallardo, Milwaukee 1

The Baseball Bloggers Alliance was formed in the fall of 2009 to encourage cooperation and collaboration between baseball bloggers of all major league teams as well as those that follow baseball more generally. As of this writing, the organization consists of 233 blogs spanning all 30 major league squads as well as general baseball writing.

The BBA is organized under a similar structure as the Baseball Writers of America, where blogs that follow the same team are combined into “chapters” and only two votes from the chapter on an award are counted. The blog chapters that are focused on general baseball were allowed two votes as well, which they could use both on the same league or split between the two leagues.

Chapters generally followed one of two methods when casting their ballot.  Either representatives of the chapter were given the ballots for voting or a “group ballot” was posted, accounting for both of their votes.

Ballots are posted on the respective blogs and for this award, were tabulated on a 7-4-3-2-1 point scale for first through fifth place. In the interest of transparency, links are given below for the ballots. Chapter affiliation is in parenthesis.  Those chapters that decided on the group method are noted with an asterisk.

American League
Camden Crazies (Baltimore)*
Boston Red Thoughts (Boston)*
The Tribe Daily (Cleveland)*
Motor City Bengals (Detroit)
Detroit Tigers Scorecard Blog (Detroit)
One Royal Way (Kansas City)*
Twins Target (Minnesota)
Bronx Baseball Daily (New York)*
Contract Year (Oakland)
Sodo Mojo (Seattle)
Tampa Bay Rays News (Tampa Bay)
1 Blue Jays Way (Toronto)
Infield Fly (Toronto)
Misc. Baseball (History)*
Advanced Fantasy Baseball (Fantasy)*
Blogging From The Bleachers (General)*
Victoria Seals Baseball Blog (Other)*

National League
Marlin Maniac (Florida)
Marlins Diehards (Florida)
Feeling Dodger Blue (Los Angeles)
The Eddie Kranepool Society (New York)*
Dugger’s Corner (Philadelphia)
Phighting On (Philadelphia)
Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? (Pittsburgh)*
Stan Musial’s Stance (St. Louis)
C70 At The Bat (St. Louis)
Friar Forecast (San Diego)*
22gigantes (San Francisco)*
Misc. Baseball (History)*
Advanced Fantasy Baseball (Fantasy)*
Blogging From The Bleachers (General)*
Victoria Seals Baseball Blog (Other)*

Prior Winners:  2009: Zach Greinke, Kansas City; Tim Lincecum, San Francisco

The official website of the BBA is located at www.baseballbloggersalliance.com.  The BBA can be found on Twitter by the handle @baseballblogs and by the hashmark #bbba.  Members of the BBA may be heard at Blog Talk Radio every Tuesday night with their call-in show, BBA Baseball Talk, which may also be downloaded as a podcast from iTunes.  For more information, contact Daniel Shoptaw at founder@baseballbloggersalliance.com

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This doesn’t surprise me too much at all. The American League was going to be an interesting race between the absolutely dominant Felix Hernandez and the wins-heavy but still viable CC Sabathia. Cliff Lee also loomed large as a sabermetric darling pick, as his absurd walk rate was the stuff of legends. Unfortunately, his stint with the Texas Rangers knocked him around a tad, and he only reached fourth place. I’m surprised that, with all of the knowledgeable sabermetric folks in the BBA, Francisco Liriano got only 13 points worth of votes. He was fourth in FanGraphs’ WAR, but had admittedly an unlucky season in terms of BABIP and was tagged as someone who couldn’t go past the sixth inning, hence the low vote totals.

Roy Halladay was a unanimous winner of the NL Walter Johnson Award, which was a totally expected result. Halladay’s season was simply monstrous no matter how you sliced it. While earlier in the year Ubaldo Jimenez and Josh Johnson were in tight competition with Halladay, Johnson’s late-season injury along with Jimenez’ general regression knocked both players out of contention. I do have an issue with Jimenez not placing highly enough compared to Adam Wainwright, who had a fine season in his own right (I had him ranked fourth in my ballot). I think voters who passed over Jimenez for Wainwright may have overlooked the often cited “Coors factor.” Sure, Coors inflates a hitters totals, or at least makes them less valuable when compared to the average. However, it also increases the value of a pitcher’s performance. I wonder if our voters made enough of a mental adjustment to consider this. Not that it matters, as the voting was close enough that the two were pretty much tied, and it isn’t as if either player would have been a poor choice for second place. Indeed, Johnson, Jimenez, and Wainwright could have been interchanged without much complaint, though I would have preferred to see Jimenez second.

Congratulations to Felix Hernandez and Roy Halladay for winning the 2010 AL and NL Walter Johnson Awards! Stay tuned over the next few days as I unveil my ballot for the Stan Musial Award for MVP and post the results here as soon as they come out.