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Chicago, IL, October 31—Chase Utley, baseball’s best baserunner, is on first base with nobody out in the top of the sixth in the 2011 NLDS. Utley and his fellow Phillies are one win away from advancing to the league championship series, leading the five-game series two games to one, but they are down in the game 3-2. If they can score, it’s a tie game. Utley knows baserunning, down to the split second. He has a full head of steam rounding second base and he knows that, as the Cards make the out at first, he’ll have just enough time, even with a throw, to make it safely into third. Except that Albert Pujols decides to skip the out at first. He comes off the bag early to intercept the throw. His momentum takes him about ten to fifteen feet closer to third base and his perfectly accurate throw nabs Utley despite his head-first slide. Instead of having the tying run on third with one out, there’s just a runner on first. A brilliant play by a brilliant defender taking out a brilliant baserunner in an extremely crucial situation. Plays like this are the reason that Albert Pujols has won his fifth Fielding Bible Award for defensive excellence in the six seasons that the award has been in existence. Joining Pujols as repeat winners in 2011 are: Mark Buehrle (his third in a row), Troy Tulowitzki (three), Adrian Beltre (three), and Brett Gardner (two). First time Fielding Bible Award winners this year are Dustin Pedroia, Austin Jackson, Justin Upton and Matt Wieters. Here’s a short refresher course on how the awards are determined: We asked our panel of ten experts to rank 10 players at each position on a scale from one to ten. We then use the same voting technique as the Major League Baseball MVP voting. A first place vote gets 10 points, second place 9 points, third place 8 points, etc. Total up the points for each player and the player with the most points wins the award. A perfect score is 100. One important distinction that differentiates our award from most other baseball awards, including the Gold Gloves, is that we only have one winner for all of Major League Baseball, instead of separate winners for each league. Our intention is to continue to stand up and say, “This is the best fielder at this position in the major leagues last season.” Oh, and one more distinction from the Gold Gloves that isn’t a distinction anymore. They have finally agreed with us this year that separate awards should be given for left fielders, center fielders, and right fielders. They are different positions, folks, and now even the Gold Glove award establishment admits it. Here are the results of THE 2011 FIELDING BIBLE AWARDS. A complete record of the voting can be found in The Bill James Handbook 2012. |
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