Thoughts on Matt Lawton and the NL ROY Award

So it appears that Matt Lawton tested positive for his horse steroid (no kidding) while in pinstripes, which of course leads to more questions, like why he played for 3 teams in a month, or more specifically, who knew? It's tempting to think that the Pirates knew he was on the juice, thus they shipped him out even though all they could get for him was Jody Gerut, though with him not coming back they might have done it anyways. And how about the Cubs? Once they traded him to the Yankees for the NY-Penn League player, they essentially had turned Jason Dubois, a pretty decent outfield prospect, into a young 20-something maybe prospect. Of course it's possible that they realized they mistake they had made in trading for Lawton and shipped him off to anyone that would take him so as to not lose Gerut for nothing (though Gerut himself may be nothing special). Truthfully, I might prefer a young, low Class A pitcher that may pan out or may not to Jody Gerut, he with the knees of an 80-year-old. Still, it certainly looks awfully suspicious that a guy got traded twice in the same month he failed a steroid test.

Meanwhile, the NL Rookie of the Year is going to be announced on Monday. With Jack Wilson already being screwed out of the Gold Glove and Jason Bay being screwed out of a Silver Slugger (to Carlos Lee of all people, you've gotta be kidding me, RBIs aren't everything people) I was thinking about getting a post ready to talk about how Zach Duke would be screwed out of the ROY when he doesn't win it (which he almost certainly won't). Instead, I'd strongly recommend reading Charlie's post on the subject, as it's more thorough than anything I could put together on the subject. Some of the highlights:

Francoeur:
July: 1326 OPS (2004-era Barry Bonds)
August: 878 OPS (Mike Sweeney)
September and October: 700 OPS (Darin Erstad)

Duke:
July: 0.87 ERA (Walter Johnson coming back from the dead to kill you ALL)
August: 2.83 ERA (Johan Santana)
September and October: 1.80 ERA (Roger Clemens)

and

Many major league regulars had around 700 (plate appearences), so Francoeur played about 39% of the time he could have and Howard played about 50%. Among starting pitchers, only a handful pitched as many as 220 innings. Duke pitched 84.7, or 39% of what he might have if he'd pitched the whole season under, say, Dusty Baker. That's the same as Francoeur, even before considering that rookies rarely pitch 220 big league innings in a year anymore. If you're going to dismiss Duke because he didn't play enough, you've got to dismiss Francoeur too.

Bottom line, Duke had an out of this world rookie season. If you're going to penalize him for not playing enough you should penalize Francouer and probably Howard as well. But the award is "Rookie of the Year" not "Rookie that played the most during the year" so Willie Taveras, he of almost 600 ABs and a .291 batting average, but only a .325 OBP, .341 SLG (that's not a typo) and 29 RBIs shouldn't come anywhere near the award. I've heard some arguments made that Duke played for a last place team so he shouldn't win the award. When it comes down to it, that should only boost his case. We were an awful baseball team this year that didn't score a ton of runs. At times it seemed like we'd go Duke, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Duke, Loss, Loss, Loss, Loss, Duke. If anything, an 8-2 record while pitching for the 2005 Pittsburgh Pirates should be bonus points in Duke's column. But it won't so I'd still look for the award to go to the media darling, Francoeur, despite his Shane Spencer like start and finish to the season.