Annals of who gives a rat's ass

Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski are better than this, no? Paying the managers and coaches who vote on defensive awards the courtesy of assuming that they're voting on the basis of bad principles—reputations, batting averages, etc.—is giving them far too much credit. The truth is they have no idea what they're on about.

Point one has to do with depth perception. Managers and most coaches watch games from the dugout. If you haven't sat in one you might not believe what a badly distorted view of the field it gives you. From it you can't tell a wide strike from an inside strike; depending on the park and whether you're home or away you may not be able to see a certain half of the infield, and unless you have unreal comic book powers, you're not likely going to be able to tell much more about what's going on in the outfield play to play than you would be able to tell what's going on in the bleachers. Infield coaches miss a lot of the action for obvious reasons.

Point two has to do with the unbalanced schedule. Minnesota, as an example, played Baltimore five times this year. Atlanta played Arizona seven times. Depending on how the schedule breaks a team might play another team in its own league less often than it might play its interleague rival.

Between physics and the fact that no team sees a decent cross section of the rest of their leagues' (let alone the sports') teams, managers and coaches are clearly not the men to be asking for first hand appraisals of defense. It's no knock on them, but they're going on scouting reports and sketchy inferences just for structural reasons. Why are smart guys even crediting them for fucking up? Better to say that they're slightly better positioned to pick out the best defensive players in baseball than I am to pick out the best ones in American football, a sport I don't watch, and leave it at that. Best to say who gives a fuck and treat the awards with the deference a film watcher pays the Academy Awards, one thinks.