Mariners Awards: Like You’ve Never Seen Them

Well, this gives away one of the awards. Mandatory Credit: Ed Szczepanski-US PRESSWIRE

We’ve obsessed ourselves with league-wide MVPs, Cy Youngs and Rookie of the Years for long enough now. Don’t worry, you won’t find any of those, or Silver Sluggers, Roberto Clemente awards or any of that crap here. I instead present you with the Mariner Awards of Irrelevance.

Let’s get things started off with the Bored Fans Relief Award.* This player made sure to keep the game moving while additionally providing action that a bored fan would enjoy (or enjoy yelling at). Our winner swung at 54.4% of all pitches and 44.2% of pitches outside the strike zone, leading the team in both categories. Not surprisingly he averaged just 3.62 pitches per plate appearance, good for second on the team. He also managed homeruns in a whopping 3.7% of his plate appearances en route to appeasing all fans tired of long, monotonous batter-pitcher matchups with a remedy of quick plate appearances full of swings, strikeouts and homeruns. His catching was always an adventure in and of itself, and without further ado, I present to you Miguel Olivo.

The Manly-Man Award* was a difficult one to choose, and so I really had to split it between two tough, manly men.  Each took a team-leading five pitches off his body without so much as a grimace, and promptly responded every time with, “thank you, sir, may I have another.”**  Each played one of the most physically demanding positions on the diamond—shortstop and catcher, respectively—while sporting the manliest and ruggedest of facial hair. I present to you, Brendan Ryan and John Jaso.

The offensive Most Well-Traveled Award goes to the guy that covered more ground than anyone. Thanks to a team-best 9.6% extra base hit percentage, our winner covered 219 total bases with his hits, and tacked on a team-leading 21 bases through thievery and deception. Playing center field put him over the top for this award, so let’s give it up for Michael Saunders.

The pitchers deserve some of this credit, too, of course. We begin with the MVP—Mean and Volatile Pitcher Award. This hardly gentle man led the team with 12 hit batsmen, and before you start pointing at garbage like innings pitched, those twelve poor souls represent four times the number that teammate, Jason Vargas, hit in 217 innings. His 13 wild pitches represented 41% of all Mariners starters’ wild pitches, and were more than twice the next highest count.  Additionally, our winner led the Mariners in something called WAR—quite the surly, temperamental sort, to be sure.  I thus present this award to Felix Hernandez.

That’s how you help your starters’ ERAs. Mandatory Credit: Steven Bisig-US PRESSWIRE

The Best Friend Award goes to Lucas Luetge, who allowed just 8 of his 50 inherited baserunners to score (16%), leaving the ERAs of many teammates intact. Additionally, he pitched 17 of his 63 outing on zero days rest, the top percentage on the team. I mean, who didn’t like Lucas Leutge? On the flip side, the Worst Friend Award goes to Stephen Pryor for allowing 10 of 17 inherited baserunners to score (59%). Side note: he also drew the most glares from his starters.**

The last award—the Pitching Efficiency Award—goes not necessarily to the pitcher that most efficiently recorded outs, but rather the pitcher that most quickly recorded outs. We fans have other crap to do, right?! This pitcher threw nearly 15% of the entire team’s innings, or about one-seventh, and did so with a team-quickest 20.0 seconds between pitches. His 5-minute, 9-second innings were the shortest on the team, and for that, we are thankful for Jason Vargas.

*Players required at least 300 PA

**Source not found