Well this is nice, eh?

Wow, a Pittsburgh Pirate won an actual, honest to goodness award this year. Besides Zach Duke's snowball's chance of winning ROtY (he more or less needs to finish just like he's started to make up for his very late start, I'd reckon) I didn't think we'd see it this year. So congratulations to Jason Bay, whose 11-for-25, 2 homer, 8 ribbie, 8 RBI week won him this week's NL Player of the Week award (according to Yahoo's rankings he was also the top fantasy player of the last week and actually the last whole month). I heard him described as a guy that doesn't have any stats that jump off the page at you, but does everything extremely well. Actually one number does stick out, albeit not a conventional one. Bay is sixth in all of baseball with a VORP of 59.7. VORP is more or less a measurement of how many runs a player contributes to the team over an average bench player (Charlie posted the whole team's VORPs a week ago). Bay isn't just a decent middle of the order hitter for us, he's one of the best hitters in the league.