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.

Curveballs for Jobu

Curveballs for Jobu is Offbasepercentage's daily trip around the ballparks.

Today's honorary bay boy is Tony Perezchica and he's here because of his whopping 5 career RBI. But we all know RBI is kind of a BS stat.

Hey gang, Jobu is a little late today because I was trying to decide whether or not to devote the entire post to Buster Posey. While I ultimately decided against it, you're still getting a healthy does of my favorite rookie catcher in the history of baseball...

Giants 1, Cubs 0. Buster Posey. Posey won the game with his 15th home run of the season to keep the Giants .5 game up on the Padres. Posey is hitting .324/.373/.522 for the season and, spoiler alert, will get our Rookie of the Year vote when the time comes for the BBA.

Padres 6, Dodgers 0. The Fathers managed to keep close to the Giants riding a complete game shutout from Clayton Richard. I don't know how they scored 6 runs considering that not on of their 1-3 hitters has an OBP over .330. Allow me to present your Manager of the Year, Bud Black and his smoke and mirrors.

Diamondbacks 3, Rockies 1. Welcome back to the NL West edition of Jobu. My newly appointed second favorite team couldn't figure out Joe Saunders and fell back to 2.5 games out of first. Saunders struck out 7 hitters over 8 innings, the most since he struck out 8 on June 26th for the Angels. New blog favorite Troy Tulowitzki fell victim to Saunders' rare K ability once and remains homerless since Saturday.

Twins 6, Indians 4. We discussed it before but it needs to be mentioned more frequently. Jim Thome is a first ballot Hall of Famer. Thome hit his 25th home run of the season and 589th of his career, good for 8th all time. His OBP is .412 this season and .404 for his career.

Angels 2, Rangers 0. Only 8.5 out! Cool Standings has the Angels at 0.1% chance to make the playoffs. So you're saying there's a chance.