....over Barry Bonds

Pendleton .319/.363/.517 with 94 R, 22 HR, 86 RBI and 10 SBs

Bonds .292/.410/.514 with 95 R, 25 HRs, 116 RBIs and 43 SBs

Both played for division winning teams

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Terry Pendleton doesn't wear batting gloves.

He is a real man.

Looking at the numbers, his year wasn't as good as his 1990 and 1992 MVP seasons (average was down, power down a lot, doubles down, stolen bases down from 1990) and Pendleton was the NL batting champion and the NL Comeback Player of the Year.


Bonds barely lost that MVP voting.

He might not have been as good as the year before and you can't hold his future seasons against him at voting time .....but he was still a better player than Pendleton

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quote:

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He might not have been as good as the year before and you can't hold his future seasons against him at voting time .....but he was still a better player than Pendleton

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Well, all those "down" thing were, as I said, down from 1990. Also, with the Pendleton story, there's emotion involved. And I don't think that's completely a bad thing.



"Better player"?

I don't neccasarily see that in 1991. I just see two different kinds of players.

[This message has been edited by TXAggie2011 (edited 6/26/2009 2:16p).]

A couple others that I disagreed with....

1990 AL Cy Young
Welch over
Clemens

1993 AL Cy Young
J.McDowell over
R.Johnson

2001 AL Cy Young
Clemens over
F.Garcia

2003 NL ROY
D.Willis over
B.Webb

2003 AL Cy Young
R.Halliday over
E.Loiza (or even Pedro for that matter)

2004 NL Cy Young
Clemens over
R.Johnson

Maddux won the NL Gold Glove from 1991-2002 & 2004-2008....what on earth did Mike Hampton do in 2003 to de-throne him that no one else has been able to do?

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Pendleton didn't even make the All-Star team during the year that he won MVP.

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Maddux won the NL Gold Glove from 1991-2002 & 2004-2008....what on earth did Mike Hampton do in 2003 to de-throne him that no one else has been able to do?

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Better fielding percentage, more putouts, almost as many assists, better range factor, etc...

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Maddux won the NL Gold Glove from 1991-2002 & 2004-2008....what on earth did Mike Hampton do in 2003 to de-throne him that no one else has been able to do?

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Hampton is a ver good defensive pitcher. Without going back and looking at that I year I would speculate that he was actually healthy enough to play the entire season. That may have helped.

Just specultation. Again, I didn't go back and look at his 2003 season stats.

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Pendleton didn't even make the All-Star team during the year that he won MVP.

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Nope, but the All-Star game is halfway through the season.

No s***. It's still amazing, though. I'm not sure if that's happened in any other year.

[This message has been edited by Seven Costanza (edited 6/26/2009 2:27p).]

Yep. It'd be an interesting stat. I'm too lazy to look all that up, though.

Pendleton's first-half OPS was actually better than his second-half OPS in '91.

Jimmy Rollins won the MVP in 2007 without making the AS team. I was wrong; it looks like it's happened a few times.



[This message has been edited by Seven Costanza (edited 6/26/2009 2:36p).]

My point on the Hampton GG was to once again remind that the award is completely irrelevant.....there is no way that over an 18 year time span only one player for only one season was better with the glove than Maddux

I also disagree that Pendleton and Bonds were different types of players. Ichiro and Giambi in '01 were different types of players. Bonds & Pendleton were very similar types of players but Pendleton hit 20 points higher even though Bonds beat him in just about every other relevant stat.

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Pendleton hit 20 points higher even though Bonds beat him in just about every other relevant stat.

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That's a fairly large difference, though.

.

[This message has been edited by TXAggie2011 (edited 6/26/2009 2:43p).]

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My point on the Hampton GG was to once again remind that the award is completely irrelevant.....there is no way that over an 18 year time span only one player for only one season was better with the glove than Maddux

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That's absolutely not true.



Maybe you can say "year to year, it is fairly irrelevant..."

But, like in the case of Maddux winning so many of them or just guys who got there once or twice, it's certainly very relevant. It illustrates who SOME of the elite fielders in time periods were.

That's very relevant.

[This message has been edited by TXAggie2011 (edited 6/26/2009 2:43p).]

Pendleton got a lot of mileage out of being a leader on a relatively young Braves team that went worst-to-first.

The stats didn't matter as much as the narrative.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_1991.shtml#NLmvp

the voting was pretty close between pendleton and bonds in '91.

OPS wasn't a commonly used stat back in '91, BA was huge though. Now you almost hear OPS and OBP as much as average.

It also didn't help Bonds that he was a jerk back then too. He's an easy guy not to like and if someone has a choice they may vote against him strictly for that reason. Doesn't make it right but I don't know how there were a few voters that didn't vote for Nolan Ryan to go in the HOF either.

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That's absolutely not true.



Maybe you can say "year to year, it is fairly irrelevant..."

But, like in the case of Maddux winning so many of them or just guys who got there once or twice, it's certainly very relevant. It illustrates who SOME of the elite fielders in time periods were.

That's very relevant.

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There are a bunch of ways to identify a guy being an elite fielder....it doesn't take a shiny award....and it doesn't mean that award is very relevant.

Maddux could have won that thing 6 times over 18 years and you would know he was an elite fielder.

The award is completely swayed by how good a player is in other areas of his game. Raffy won it one year with Baltimore when he only played a handful of games at first base (the rest were at DH).

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Raffy actually won that Gold Glove when he was with the Rangers. The sad part is that Lee Stevens was Texas first baseman. He deserved the award, he was best fielder in AL.

Pendleton led a bunch of no-names to the World Series. They're Hall of Famers now, but at the time they were untested youngsters.

To the original question. Bond's was going to be a cheater and the writers knew it. So they punished him ahead of time.


hth

[This message has been edited by Swabbie02 (edited 6/26/2009 7:55p).]

quote:

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There are a bunch of ways to identify a guy being an elite fielder....it doesn't take a shiny award....and it doesn't mean that award is very relevant.

Maddux could have won that thing 6 times over 18 years and you would know he was an elite fielder.

The award is completely swayed by how good a player is in other areas of his game. Raffy won it one year with Baltimore when he only played a handful of games at first base (the rest were at DH).

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All I said was it can help illustrate who some of the elite fielders over a time period were.

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Pendleton got a lot of mileage out of being a leader on a relatively young Braves team that went worst-to-first.

The stats didn't matter as much as the narrative

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This. And he played lights out during the Braves stretch run after the break. Voting went for "most valuable" and not "best" or "best year."

I actually agree with the Pendleton vote that year.
EDIT: Substitute August for late summer.

[This message has been edited by Captain Insano (edited 6/27/2009 8:31p).]

he hit .254 in august

Anybody else wondering why nobody is factoring in the other half of baseball....defense

I pulled that month from my memory of the late summer of that year, BMX....I was 14 at the time. I should have said "post all star break." Ok, so he batted .360 in July and .336 in September.

Before 2002, Bonds was characterized by his choking when it mattered - Pendleton was not and was rewarded for his ROLE as opposed to statistics.

i still wonder how morneau beat jeter a couple of years ago

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Before 2002, Bonds was characterized by his choking when it mattered - Pendleton was not and was rewarded for his ROLE as opposed to statistics.

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The voting is done at the end of the regular season and in 1991 and to that point Pendleton's career post-season numbers weren't anything to write home about (73 AB, .246/.295/.329 with 0 HR, 10 R and 9 RBI).

As for Bonds, he had one previous post season under his belt at that time and I can't see how the voters would hold his 1990 post season performance (18 AB, .167/.375/.167 with 0 HR, 4 R and 1 RBI) against him in the 1991 MVP race. The pressure as a "choker" came after the '91 and '92 post-seasons not after his lone appearance in '90.

And as mentioned, if you're going to consider defense, both Bonds and Pendleton were considered as some of the best defenders at that time.

Interestingly enough, Pendleton won the aforementioned Gold Glove in 1987, 1989, and 1992 - not winning it in his MVP season of 1991. Bonds won his second in a row in '92 (he won 8 over the 9 year span of 1990-1998)

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[This message has been edited by AgRyan04 (edited 6/27/2009 9:00p).]

Let me dust off the memory bank from 1991 and throw in some more background.

I believe 1991 was the first year of ESPN's TV contract with MLB to televise baseball 5 nights a week. There was Monday night baseball, Tuesday night, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday games. This also started the every night "studio shows" where the hosts commented on all the games and everything.

The Braves were America's darling at the time and of course had been losing for so long. Pendleton was one of the few "known" players on the 91 Braves due to his time with the Cardinals in the world series. So he got the tag of being the team leader and mentor from all the commentators.

Just 3 years earlier, Kirk Gibson won the MVP with the Dodgers in part for being the "veteran inspirational leader" and so forth, despite not having the best stats.

Also back then people thought that fellow pirate Bobby Bonilla might be a better player than Bonds, so Bonilla took away a few votes from Barry.

All in all though, by 1993 it was widely recognized as a mistake that Bonds did not win the MVP that year, and that season was referred to as Bonds "4th MVP" for all practical purposes.

another possibility is that Ted Turner owned the Braves and TBS at the time. Almost all Braves games were broadcast across the country. Many more voters saw TP play on a regular basis than did Bonds. This could have influenced a few voters.

Bond's reputation as a selfish player/frontrunner was documented during his run for 30/30 in 1990. My inclination is that voters would much rather have voted for an inspirational leader of a team who happens to win a batting title in the process (and, yes, is on TV every single night) over an egocentric talent out of Pittsburgh, who, at the time, shared the spotlight with Bonilla.

[This message has been edited by Captain Insano (edited 6/29/2009 7:06a).]

pendelton was clutch, and may have been a leader in the clubhouse as well.

the short answer, is that before the internet, voters went on their "gut" and BA much more than now.