Posted by Bill Baer on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 4:09 pm

The long-awaited American League Most Valuable Player award was handed out this afternoon to (drum roll) Joe Mauer, catcher of the Minnesota Twins!

They got it right after all. They didn’t award C.C. Sabathia the AL Cy Young award over Zack Greinke and they didn’t give the AL MVP to Mark Teixeira over Mauer. The times they are a-changin’.

Still, what would awards season be without some bitterness about some of the more meaningless votes? As Ken Davidoff reported on Twitter:

Keizo Konishi of Kyodo News, based in Seattle, voted Miguel Cabrera first.

Cabrera had a fine season, no doubt. He compiled a .402 wOBA with 34 HR and 96 RBI. His fielding wasn’t a liability according to his 3.1 UZR/150 and was a slight base running detriment (about -2 base running runs according to Baseball Prospectus). Certainly a fine candidate for a top-ten MVP vote.

[To be spoken a la Stephen A. Smith] Howevah!

…not a first place MVP vote, especially not over Mauer and Ben Zobrist, who finished in eighth place despite finishing second in WAR behind Greinke (and ahead of Mauer) according to FanGraphs. As R.J. Anderson explains at DRaysBay, Zobrist did not get a vote higher than sixth place on any ballot.

C’mon!

Zobrist was just as good a hitter as Cabrera as evidenced by his .408 wOBA. He was a supremely good fielder at two positions (30.8 UZR/150 at second base; 40.2 in right field*) and was an average base runner.

*As my compatriots at Baseball Think Factory pointed out to me in a conversation about a week ago, due to the relatively small samples of innings, Zobrist’s defensive performances need to be regressed. This is because it is possible that Zobrist simply had a favorable sample of defensive opportunities, which is much more likely in a sample of 700 defensive innings than it is in a full season (about 1,200 innings). So, while Zobrist did have a great season, there’s a good chance he wasn’t nearly as good as his UZR/150 indicates.

When you add it all up, Zobrist should have been given a lot more recognition for his fantastic 2009 than was shown in the AL MVP voting. There are only two players who, debatably, had better seasons than Zobrist: Greinke and Mauer.

There are other items to complain about in the way the BBWAA voting went down, such as Mark Teixeira finishing second in the balloting, but those will be covered ad nauseam. This is simply an attempt to highlight the fantastic season Zobrist — my pick for AL MVP — had in 2009.

That Mauer won is not an injustice at all. He certainly deserved it and had as good a season as Zobrist. And the BBWAA did pick the right Cy Young in Greinke. They’ll likely pick Albert Pujols for NL MVP, and they elected Tim Lincecum the NL Cy Young. By and large, the BBWAA — perhaps with the help of Sabermetric-savvy voters such as Keith Law, Will Carroll, and Christina Kahrl — are selecting the right winners, even if there’s a lot of room to disagree with the 2-10 rankings.