The 'Cy Dunn,' Breakout Player of the Year and more ways to add to the fun of award season
The following is a transcript of a segment from this week's episode of the Cut4Cast podcast. To hear more of the Cut4 staff's weekly banterings about which position player is the best at pitching or how baseball would work in outer space, subscribe to the Cut4Cast by clicking here.
Next week, BBWAA Award winners will be announced: The Cy Young Award winners will add to their trophy cases, the MVP debates will be settled for another year and two rookies and managers will be justly congratulated. You can even vote for the Esurance MLB Awards right now! Winners will be announced Nov. 17, live on MLB Network.
But is there any category of award that's left out? On this week's Cut4Cast, Dakota Gardner, Gemma Kaneko and Matt Monagan invented their own awards to give to players who deserve trophies even if they're not quite MVPs.
Dakota: My question to the two of you is if you could create an award, which award would you want to create? Matt?
Matt: I was thinking about that. I'm always interested in -- people always love when a position player pitches. So you could do the best position player pitcher of the year.
Dakota: Who's it named after?
Matt: So I was thinking there's been a few over the years that have been really good - [Jeff] Francoeur, call it the Frenchy. The Ichiro. Ichiro was great when he pitched. But a really good one, which is kind of a pun on Cy Young, is Cy Dunn: Adam Dunn.
Dakota: Done. Lock it down. That needs to be an award.
Gemma: Wow that's definitely what it's called.
Matt: Dunn pitched three or four years ago, and it was hilarious because he's like this huge, ginormous man pitching.
Dakota: Speaking of awards, can we talk about when Adam Dunn won the Comeback Player of Year Award? And it was just, he came back from being bad. It wasn't an injury. He was just bad. And then it was like he's good again; let's give it to him.
Gemma: I support that. I support that use of Comeback Player of the Year.
Matt: It's weird. What's the definition? How does it work?
Gemma: Because what if nobody who got injured came back really strong? Why not give it to someone who's just suddenly good again? I really like that.
Dakota: Gemma, what's the award that you're going to create? I don't know that either of us is going to top the Cy Dunn.
Gemma: No. The Cy Dunn is just too perfect. There's really no way to do that. But I want to create the Julio Franco Award for Veteran Players. Rookies get awards, and I want it to be for old man players in the game who are still good. Like, David Ortiz could have won it in his last season.
Dakota: Yeah, he definitely would have won it last year for sure.
Gemma: Sometimes you go your entire career, and you just miss out on certain milestones, and it would be nice to be like, you have longevity, and you're also still good. You may not be at your peak, but you've still been good for a sustained amount of time. You should get an award, and it's the Julio Franco Old Man Award.
Dakota: I love it. Who's this year's Julio Franco Award winner?
Gemma: Who would it be?
Matt: Do you have to be a certain age?
Gemma:
Matt: Beltran won a World Series.
Dakota: If Pujols was not terrible…
Gemma: Beltran would win it this year. It's him. That's who wins it.
Matt: He didn't have a great year, but he won a World Series.
Gemma: I guess if we voted at the same time as we vote on all the other awards, it would not have been Beltran.
Matt: That's true. You have a Rookie of the Year Award, why not have an Old Man one.
Dakota: That's funny because it's similar to my award. I thought of two. One is -- you know I love the Gold Glove Award. We were just talking about that. Love defensive highlights. We should have a Gold Glove for the DH.
Matt: What?
Gemma: How?
Dakota: There's a Gold Glove for the pitcher, so there should be a Gold Glove for the designated hitter. I'm not talking about Rafael Palmeiro's 1999 Gold Glove, which he received for playing 128 games at DH. I'm instead talking about which designated hitter you think would make the best fielder if they fielded the ball.
Matt: So you just guess.
Dakota: You're just like, 'I don't know, I think he'd be great.'
Gemma: Dakota uses awards to make rhetorical points. Fun times.
Dakota: My actual award is the Breakout Star of the Year, because we have Rookie of the Year and we have MVP, but there's no, "This is like, your third, fourth year in the league and now you're figuring it out. Maybe you're not the MVP, but you also aren't a rookie, and you deserve an award." You maybe would name this one after
