BBA Announces Goose Gossage Award Winners

We continue to roll out the awards for the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, this time with the Goose Gossage Award regarding the best relievers in baseball.

For a change, we get to see a Royals player in contention, as Joakim Soria came in second place in the voting on the American League side, losing out to Rafael Soriano, who is plenty deserving of the award. Soria’s got a strong case too, but even the biased Royals fan in me can’t put him over Soriano. But still, it’s close.

Nonetheless, the press release is after the jump, as always:

SORIANO, WILSON DOMINATE GOOSE GOSSAGE AWARD VOTING

For an inaugural vote, it wasn’t much of a contest.

Soriano, who captured fourteen first place votes in route to an overall
total of 94 points, posted a 1.73 ERA and converted 45 saves in 48
chances. Soriano also had a 0.80 WHIP and struck out 57 in 62.1
innings pitched. He easily outdistanced Kansas City reliever Joakim
Soria, who received 48 points.

In the National League, Wilson accumulated seventeen first place votes
and 104 points overall after his season in which he piled up 48 saves
(in 53 chances) with a 1.81 ERA and a 1.18 WHIP. Wilson also struck
out 93 in just 74.2 innings. He outpaced San Diego closer Heath Bell,
who lagged behind with 52 points.

While the BBA has named all of their post-season awards after greats of
the game, Gossage gave his blessing to do so earlier in the year,
inspiring the rest of the awards to be renamed as well.

The complete voting results are as follows (first place votes in parenthesis):

American League

Rafael Soriano, Tampa Bay (14) 94

Joakim Soria, Kansas City (4) 48

Mariano Rivera, New York (1) 23

Joaquin Benoit, Tampa Bay (3) 19

Neftali Feliz, Texas 12

Matt Thornton, Chicago (1) 9

Daniel Bard, Boston 1

Jonathan Papelbon, Boston 1

National League

Brian Wilson, San Francisco (17) 104

Heath Bell, San Diego (2) 52

Carlos Marmol, Chicago (5) 41

Billy Wagner, Atlanta 19

Arthur Rhodes, Cincinnati (1) 5

Hong-Chih Kuo, Los Angeles 2

Matt Belisle, Colorado 1

Jonny Venters, Atlanta 1

The BBA is organized under a similar structure as the Baseball Writers
of America, where blogs that follow the same team are combined into
“chapters” and only two votes from the chapter on an award are counted.
The blog chapters that are focused on general baseball were allowed two
votes as well, which they could use both on the same league or split
between the two leagues.

Chapters generally followed one of two methods when casting their
ballot. Either representatives of the chapter were given the ballots
for voting or a “group ballot” was posted, accounting for both of their
votes.

Ballots are posted on the respective blogs and tabulated on a 5-3-1
point scale for first, second and third. In the interest of
transparency, links are given below for the ballots. Chapter
affiliation is in parenthesis. Those chapters that decided on the
group method are noted with an asterisk.

American League

Camden Crazies (Baltimore)*

Boston Red Thoughts (Boston)*

The Tribe Daily (Cleveland)*

Motor City Bengals (Detroit)

Detroit Tigers Scorecard Blog (Detroit)

One Royal Way (Kansas City)*

Twinkie Talk (Minnesota)

Over The Baggy (Minnesota)

Bronx Baseball Daily (New York)*

Contract Year (Oakland)

Jeff’s Mariners Fan Blog (Seattle)