My awards voting; Yanks considering lineup changes for wild-card game

Nationals slugger Bryce Harper (NL MVP) and Astros rookie Carlos Correa (AL ROY) are strong candidates for their respective awards. Getty Images, AP Photo

Most years, the idea of casting a ballot for a major award sounds like a fun thing, like taking an easy math quiz. You want a relatively logical choice to be apparent, and if you turn in the ballot with what appears to be the right decision, then you can feel good about it.

But that's not how the voting for most of the major awards seems to be this year. Rather, the voting is a lot more like a Rorschach test, where there really is no wrong answer and no right answer, and how you interpret the numbers is just as important as the numbers themselves. This is particularly true of the National League Cy Young Award vote, for which I've been waffling back and forth, mostly depending on the opinion of the person I spoke with last.

With that in mind … If I had a Baseball Writers' Association of America vote for an award -- and I haven't for the past 20 seasons -- the ballots would look something like this:


1. Bryce Harper, Nationals: His production this year was staggering, historic, so good that opponents stopped pitching to him. We learned this year that Harper probably won't ever win a Triple Crown, because any time there are runners on base, he's not going to get pitches to hit.

2. Paul Goldschmidt, Diamondbacks
3. Andrew McCutchen, Pirates
4. Nolan Arenado, Rockies
5. Joey Votto, Reds
6. Anthony Rizzo, Cubs
7. Buster Posey, Giants
8. Jake Arrieta, Cubs
9. A.J. Pollock, Diamondbacks
10. Zack Greinke, Dodgers

Players I hated to leave off the ballot: Clayton Kershaw, Matt Carpenter.