BBA NL Connie Mack

Once again, it's Baseball Bloggers Alliance award season! It's a lot like the BBWAA award season, just with different names because they litigious with their free time. The fine staff here at Off Base will guide you through our ballots over the next few days. First up, the Connie Mack, or, how I learned to stop agonizing over whether or not a manager really has as much control over a team's performance as I believe they do. 

What a strange season in the National League this year. 15 teams in the league, and only six finished with records better than .500. At least they made this ballot a little bit easier to fill out than the AL where you could have conceivably chosen from any number of managers to take the top spot. Not like it really matters anyway, these are the managers, their affect on the outcome of a baseball game is magnified by fans and media members, but I'm not totally convinced that they really make as big of an impact as we like to believe that they do. With that being said, here's the Off Base ballot for the Connie Mack Award in the National League.

BBA NL Connie Mack Award Ballot 2011

After a full year of writing nonsense, the Baseball Blogger Alliance has yet to kick us out and still encourages us to vote on stuff. And not just things we know like "how sick will I get from eating that." Which, of course, the answer is always "very." First up is the Connie Mack award for manager of the year.

1. Ron Roenicke, Milwaukee
It seems like Roenicke isn't a big fan of bunting or, especially, sac bunting. Did I do any research to back that up? No, but it's adorable that you asked. Look, as long as a manager isn't butchering a lineup or bullpen, I don't see much of a difference between them. Roenicke did a fine job with a good lineup and rotation and K-Rod didn't punch anyone, that we know of. This award will probably go to Kirk Gibson and I wouldn't argue with that choice so...

2. Kirk Gibson, Arizona
Nobody was really expecting the Diamondbacks to win the NL West or win 94 games. But Gibby turned Ian Kennedy into a Cy Young candidate and Justin Upton into an MVP candidate with a strict conditioning program of taping their eyelids open and showing them his 1988 home run on loop for days at a time. It paid off. Well, Joe Saunders became an unwilling assassin for the Communist Party but you have to expect some casualties with that kind of training.

3. Jim Riggleman, Washington
The Nationals almost finished the season at .500 with an 80-81 record. Take a bow Jim Riggleman, surely your efforts were appreciated with a contract extension.

3. Charlie Manuel, Philadelphia
The Phillies, 102-60, finished with baseball's best record behind Manuel. According to my simulation, one of those drinking bird toys would have won 107 games with Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels in its rotation.

BBA Announces Washington, Black Win Connie Mack Award

WASHINGTON, BLACK WIN CONNIE MACK AWARD

Ron Washington of the Texas Rangers and Bud Black of the San Diego Padres were named winners of the Connie Mack Award by the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, noting them as the best managers in their respective leagues for 2010.

Washington, who weathered a drug controversy in spring training, led Texas to their fifth divisional title since 1994 and their first since 1999. While the voting was based on his regular season accomplishments, Washington also guided his team to their first ever postseason series victory when they eliminated the Tampa Bay Rays in five games in the American League Divisional Series.

Washington received ten first place votes in route to accumulating 74 total points. He edged out Minnesota Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, who received 67 points.

In the National League, Black’s guidance of a Padres team almost universally expected to finish last to first place most of the summer helped him edge Dusty Baker of the Cincinnati Reds by the slimmest of margins. The fact that the Padres fell just short of the playoffs while the Reds won the NL Central helped lead to the tight race. Black garnered nine first place selections and 53 total points to Baker’s seven first place nods and 51 total points.

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

American League

Ron Washington, Texas (10) 74

Ron Gardenhire, Minnesota (7) 67

Joe Maddon, Tampa Bay (4) 35

Terry Francona, Boston (3) 20

Cito Gaston, Toronto 9

Buck Showalter, Baltimore 9

Joe Girardi, New York 2

National League

Bud Black, San Diego (9) 53

Dusty Baker, Cincinnati (7) 51

Bobby Cox, Atlanta (2) 33

Bruce Bochy, San Francisco (3) 29

Charlie Manuel, Philadelphia (1) 27

Brad Mills, Houston 3

Mike Quade, Chicago 2

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 224 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 tabulated on a 5-3-1 point scale for first, second and third. 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)*

Toeing The Rubber (Boston)*

The Tribe Daily (Cleveland)*

Motor City Bengals (Detroit)

Switch Hitting Pitchers (Detroit)

One Royal Way (Kansas City)

Seth Speaks (Minnesota)

Bronx Baseball Daily (New York)*

Contract Year (Oakland)

Jeff’s Mariners Fan Blog (Seattle)

Rise of the Rays (Tampa Bay)

Baseball Is My Boyfriend (Texas)*

The Blue Jay Hunter (Toronto)

500 Level Fan (Toronto)

Advanced Fantasy Baseball (Fantasy)*

Misc. Baseball (History)*

Victoria Seals Baseball Blog (Other)*

Blogging From The Bleachers (General)*

National League

Prose and Ivy (Chicago)*

Cincinnati Reds Blog (Cincinnati)

Astros County (Houston)

Feeling Dodger Blue (Los Angeles)

Bernie’s Crew (Milwaukee)*

Brewers Bar (Milwaukee)*

The Eddie Kranepool Society (New York)*

Dugger’s Corner (Philadelphia)

Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? (Pittsburgh)*

i70 Baseball (St. Louis)

The Outfield Ivy (St. Louis)

Friar Forecast (San Diego)*

Advanced Fantasy Baseball (Fantasy)*

Misc. Baseball (History)*

Victoria Seals Baseball Blog (Other)*

Blogging From The Bleachers (General)*

Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf (Miscellaneous)*

Prior Winners

2009: Mike Scioscia, Los Angeles of Anaheim; Jim Tracy, Colorado

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.

BBA NL Connie Mack Award Ballot

Baseball's award season is upon us and we finally have a vote that counts for something this year. We're proud members of the Baseball Blogger Alliance and they've been kind enough to give us ballots. The only thing the BBWAA ever gave us was food poisoning that time they had us over for a dinner party. Today we'll be unveiling our NL Connie Mack Ballot for manager of the year.

1. Bud Black
The Padres unraveled at the end of the season to finish 2 games out of the NL West. It was still quite the feat considering the Padres were widely predicted to finish last. Black, Mike Scioscia's former pitching coach with the Angels, keeps producing quality relief pitchers from the secret underground factory under Petco. Black also got tremendous innings from youngsters Mat Latos and Clayton Richards. He won 90 games with just one offensive player, Adrian Gonzalez. The rest of the lineup was filled with David Ecksteins. Let's see you win 90 games with that.

2. Bobby Cox
The longtime Braves skipper is sure to get some sentimental love after getting his team into the playoffs in his final year. I'm giving him some love for having the balls to start a 20-year-old from day one. Jason Heyward rewarded his manager with 18 home runs and a .277/.393/.456 line. Heyward was probably the Braves best offensive player too. His other outfielders included the likes of Nate McLouth and Melky Cabrera. Let's see you win 91 games with that.

3. Dusty Baker
*sigh* I don't feel great about this one due to Dusty's poor bullpen management and playing Jonny Gomes in the outfield. True story, Gomes is so bad in the outfield UZR tried to quit FanGraphs instead of measuring him.[citation needed] Despite all of that, Baker did "guide" the Reds to 91 wins and finished 5 games ahead of the Cardinals for first place in the Central. I think I need a shower after putting Baker on this ballot. Something feels so dirty about it.