(Note: the following preamble is 99% unchanged from the previously announced awards, so feel free to skip it if you've already read it.)

One of the nice things about having a whole network of baseball sites is that occasionally we get to pretend we're real writers and collaborate on projects with one another. Now that the baseball season is over, and before everyone's focus turns to the free agent and trade markets, we look to award the heroes of the this past year. And by "heroes" I mean "multi-millionaire baseball players". The BBWAA awards won't be announced until next week -- and at this point most of their opinions brush dangerously close to utter irrelevancy -- so SB Nation gets the jump on them by announcing the winners of our awards voting this week. As much as anything, it's an effort to see if our cadre of basement-dwellers can do a better job than the professionals at getting the awards correct.

We have already revealed the Manager of the Year award. Today we present the results for Rookie of the Year, an award which no Met has won since Dwight Gooden in 1984.

National League SBN bloggers could only vote for the NL awards; American League bloggers were similarly restricted to voting for their own league's awards. Here are the results of the National League Rookie of the Year voting. American League results can be found after the jump.

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The season is over and the witless rumors are already afoot. As we brace ourselves to be inundated with similar baseless piffle in the coming weeks and months, the best defense against rampant speculation is, well, rampant speculation, but at least an effort can be made to be somewhat realistic in our rampancy. Having said that, we'd like to announce the 2009 Amazin' Avenue Offseason Plan contest, where you guys get the opportunity to don your general manager caps and dream up a plan to fix the Mets.

Here's how it works: we're going to set a deadline by which all entries must be submitted via FanPost. We will select the best of the bunch (three, five, it depends on how many good entries we receive), and then we'll present those finalists to the community for a vote. We will be periodically bumping some of the best plans to the front page. As for the rules and guidelines, they are as follows.

1. The title of your FanPost must begin with 'AAOP:' (no quotes). You can follow that with whatever title you want, but it must begin with 'AAOP:' so we can easily distinguish them from non-contest FanPosts. If you do not follow this rule your entry will be excluded from consideration. It's a very simple rule so try not to screw it up.
2. The deadline for FanPost submission is 5pm EST on Monday, 11/16/2009. No exceptions.
3. There is no mandatory length, but obviously you'll want to be as verbose as is necessary to elucidate the genius of your plan.
4. Total 2010 payroll can't exceed $150 million, give or take a few bucks. Same goes for 2011 and beyond, so don't try to backload your deals to skirt the 2010 payroll restriction.
5. Use spellcheck and proofread for grammar, punctuation, and usage errors. If you can't be bothered with making your entry readable then we can't be bothered with actually reading it.
6. Try to make it look good. Add some images and some tables. MS Paint something. Strong writing (and good ideas) are of paramount importance, but asthetics still count. I'm not saying that a straight essay can't win, but I am encouraging you to spice it up a bit.
7. Feasibility of plan execution is important. Don't suggest the Mets trade Bobby Parnell for Joe Mauer. It ain't going to happen.
8. Whether or not the Mets might realistically execute your plan doesn't matter as long as the plan itself can be considered realistic given the current free agent and trade markets.
9. If you have already written an offseason plan in the FanPosts, feel free to clean it up (or not) and repost it (Rule #1 above still applies).
10. ADDED: Free agent salary should be realistic. We're not going to quibble over a million dollars here or there (who would?), so if you want to call Matt Holliday $17 million or $19 million, it doesn't much matter for the purpose of this exercise.

The winner will receive, courtesy of Uncommon Goods, a small slab of rusty metal. Actually, it's a piece of steel from Shea Stadium, framed in plexiglass and suitable for display on your desk, wall, shelf, mantel, nightstand, casket, or anywhere really. You can read more about the item or buy one for yourself or someone else at Uncommon Goods.

That's it. You can start posting now. Good luck.

One of the nice things about having a whole network of baseball sites is that occasionally we get to pretend we're real writers and collaborate on projects with one another. Now that the baseball season is over, and before everyone's focus turns to the free agent and trade markets, we look to award the heroes of the this past year. And by "heroes" I mean "multi-millionaire baseball players". The BBWAA awards won't be announced until next week -- and at this point most of their opinions brush dangerously close to utter irrelevancy -- so SB Nation gets the jump on them by announcing the winners of our awards voting this week. As much as anything, it's an effort to see if our cadre of basement-dwellers can do a better job than the professionals at getting the awards correct.

Today we present the Manager of the Year voting, which is really just the manager of the team that most exceeded expectations. It's kind of a meaningless award but we include it to keep the awards analogous to those of the BBWAA.

National League SBN bloggers could only vote for the NL awards; American League bloggers were similarly restricted to voting for their own league's awards. Here are the results of the National League Manager of the Year voting. American League results can be found after the jump.

Continue reading this post »

I know it's already linked in the FanShots, but if you've had any sort of argument with a Yankees fan in the past twenty-four hours and found your "They spend more money than anyone!" justification quickly rebuffed, go read Joe Posnanski's latest blog entry and arm yourself for the next encounter.

Here are a few excerpts.

There’s something else that people say: They talk about how money doesn’t guarantee wins. And they point out that other teams (the Mets, the Cubs, the Astros, etc.) spend a lot of money and don’t win.

/.../

But the Yankees are a whole different argument. They are their own argument. The Yankees are not a big market team. They DWARF big market teams. They are quantitatively different from every other team in baseball and every other team in American sports. They don’t just spend more money than every other team. They spend A LOT more money than every other team.

/.../

Don’t like it? Don’t watch. Some people have stopped watching, I suppose. But many of us keep on because we love baseball and there’s enough randomness in the game itself and enough volatility in the playoffs to distract us from the lunacy of having the game so ridiculously tilted toward one team.

/.../

And then: That team that spent $50 million more than any other team, that team with three sure Hall of Famers and as many as four others, that team that bought Milwaukee’s best pitcher and Anaheim’s best hitter and Toronto’s No. 2 starter and Boston’s favorite Idiot and the most expensive player in the history of baseball and so on, that team will win the World Series, and spray champagne on each other, and they will tell you that they won because they came together as a group and kept pulling themselves off the ground and didn’t listen to the doubters.

And then, if you are a not a Yankees fan, you will want to throw up. If you are not a Yankees fan, you are left hoping that next year the randomness of a short playoff series will get the Yankees and allow some other team to win so we can celebrate the hope of Opening Day. And that’s baseball.

As my deep-seated contempt for the Yankees has no known limit, I was pulling for the Phillies in this one, which might have been their first problem since everything I root for falls apart these days (see: Mets, New York). Unfortunately, True Yankees™ like C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and, yes, Alex Rodriguez, summoned all the grission they could find in their $200 million bones, and smote the Phillies and everyone else to get Back Where They Belong™. Philadelphia will just have to content itself with the fact that its fans are bigger douches than New York's. After all, not every team can be back-to-back world champtions.

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The Mets have had nineteen managers in their 48 year history, from Casey Stengel, who helmed the incipient mess of the early sixties, to Jerry Manuel, who gangsta-fies the current bloated injury-fest. Davey Johnson has managed the most games (1012); Mike Cubbage has managed the fewest (7). Two have managed for parts of seven seasons (Johnson, Bobby Valentine); four have managed for less than one season (Cubbage, Salty Parker, Roy McMillan, Frank Howard).

Here is a chart of the winning percentages of all nineteen managers, from lowest to highest.

(click to embiggen)

We all know that a manager is really only as good as his players. Davey Johnson's players were great; Casey Stengel's were woeful. Considering the discourteous manner in which Willie Randolph was let go two seasons ago, and considering how unfavorably he seems to be remembered by Mets' fans, the man owns the second-highest winning percentage in team history, sandwiched between Met Rushmore skippers Valentine and Johnson.

By now I'm sure you see the visual refresh that was implemented here (and across SB Nation) this morning. It's not a comprehensive redesign, but the look of the site has been tightened up, some fonts tweaked, some white space eliminated, and a few other minor layout changes put in place. The main goals of this refresh are to improve readability of the sites and speed up load times, two areas which folks have grumbled about in the past.

As with anything new, some people are going to be afraid of the changes and want to go back to the old way. I assure you that the changes were made for good reasons and that we'll all get used to them very soon. That said, sometimes there are a few hiccups along the way, so if you notice something that isn't working properly, use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of this page and select "I think something is broken" from the subsequent page. This will send a note to our tech support team with whatever information you provide so they can take a look at the issue.

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