Okay, so I can’t sit here at work and pretend to work anymore, I’ve got to let some of this anger out. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

There. I feel better. Well, not really, I’m still plenty pissed off. Oh, and why am I so profoundly unhappy at this moment? Allow me to clue you in:

Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia has won the American League Most Valuable Player award.

What?! WHAT?!

Now, I won’t lie, I am a Red Sox hater. Deal with it. I was happy for them in 2004 when the broke the “curse” (which never existed) and won the WS, but ever since then they have been insufferable. Main stream media touts them non-stop and never seems to criticize them the same manner in which the Yankees get crapped on. And the fans…oh god the awfulness of Red Sox fans! I would rather wear a suit of raw meat into a Pissed Off Dogs With Rabies camp then have to ever hold a conversation with one of these Massholes. The fair-wheathered-ness of it all is just grotesque. But Pedroia, for some reason, seems to personify that hatred for me. Maybe it’s because I feel a lot of his praise is undeserved (it is). Maybe I feel like he’s the personification of the hidden racism of the Boston fans. I can’t quite place my finger on it, but I hate that guy. And now he is the best player in the American League?! I don’t think so. To quote the recently deceased Fire Joe Morgan:

“Pedroier [sic] is having an excellent year. But how about Kevin Youkilis, and his .960 OPS, excellent defense (2 errors last night notwithstanding) and 58 XBH?”

And they are the smartest bloggers in the world! Dare we look at statistics? Yes, we dare! We’ll compare Ped’s numbers to Morneau (2nd place), Milton Bradley, and his teammate Youkilis (AL ranking in parenthesis).

Avg/OBP/OPS/Runs/HR/RBI

Pedroia .326(2)/ .376(10) /.869(17) /118(1) /17(42) /83(27)

Morneau .300(16) /.374(16) /.873(15)/ 97(15)/ 23(18)/ 129(2)

Bradley .321(3) /.436(1) /.999(1) /78(37) /22(24)/ 77(33)

Youkilis .312(6) /.390(6) /.958(4) /91(22) /29(12) /115(4)

So it doesn’t take a Stats degree from MIT to realize that Pedroia doesn’t have the best numbers. So that leaves us with my least favorite talking point in all of sports…

Intangibles. The things that “don’t show up in the scorecard” and makes people “a real good clubhouse presence” or “clutch”. I’m sick of it. If they are indeed intangible, the HOW IN THE BLUE HELL DO YOU MEASURE ONE GUY’S AGAINST ANOTHER?! How do you quantify the unquantifiable and then say which is the biggest? That’s like measuring a soul. Here’s a hint, voters: when you have to make things up why the person was the best, they probably weren’t. Pedroia is often credited with being a “sparkplug” and then people point to his league leading number of runs scored. But think about it; if he was only 10th in OBP and somehow still scored more than the guy who was 1st (Bradley), doesn’t that mean he had really good people hitting behind him and scoring him the whopping 37.6% of the time he got on base? Guys like Youkilis!

Unbelievable. I still don’t believe it. I refuse to except it. Dustin Pedroia winning AL MVP in 2008 will go into the part of my brain where Terry Pendleton and Jeff Kent’s MVPs sit. To all you baseball “writers” out there that completely fumbled this one: suck it!