Hello and welcome to episode 1774 for Poptic Reviled, the bandwrested podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters,

I'm Nick Rallye, bandwrested and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindbergh of the Ranger, Ben Howerio.

I'm doing well. I have a bunch of people in my mentions congratulating me on

Shohei O'Tani's unanimous LVP award as if I was somehow responsible or should share in his

accomplishment, but really I want to be maybe the first, maybe not the first, to congratulate you

on Mike Zunino's 10th place MVP vote just as impressive an accomplishment. Thank you, you know,

Mike Zunino, he's good. Well, he's good. Yeah, you can say that now. He has received MVP votes,

wealth and MVP votes. Yeah, yeah, I don't know which is more surprising that O'Tani would win

the MVP award or that Zunino would receive MVP consideration. Let's say that's a generous way

to put it, but both of those things happen. So today is going to be the first of our stove leak

discussion episodes. We'll be covering the first four episodes of the show. But before we get to

stove leak, let's talk a little bit about awards week and not just O'Tani and Zunino. All the major

awards have been announced now. And I guess if you graphed my level of interest in awards voting

over time, it would be a straight line down. I mean, it would be a linear decline. I guess I'm

less and less interested, I suppose, in who wins awards. But I am interested in them in the sense

that they may be act as a referendum of sorts on how player value is perceived. So it's not that I

really have a stake in the outcomes or even that it affects my thinking about a player season so much.

I mean, I'm glad that O'Tani won, but I would not be any less impressed by what he achieved if he

had not won for some reason. But I am interested in the conversation about the awards. I suppose

maybe it's an overbid to say that the award results reflect how the media at large perceives

player value, let alone how teams do or how fans do. Because again, every award result is based

on a subset of voters. It's what 30 people thought of a given race and granted those 30 people

...