SAN FRANCISCO — For four-straight days this week, MLB Network ran hour-long specials to reveal the 2018 award winners. After each winner was announced, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America released full ballots on its website.
Nobody connected to the Giants had any reason to really pay attention to any of this.
The Giants did not, of course, have a winner or anyone that even came particularly close. But for a second-straight year, they also did not have a single player -- or their manager -- receive a single vote for any of the four major awards.
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The MVP ballot has 10 slots and 19 different players received at least one vote, but you couldn’t make the case for a Giant to even finish 10th. There was no Cy Young candidate and Bruce Bochy was out of the Manager of the Year race in the middle of the summer. The organization’s best shot at some consideration was in the Rookie of the Year balloting, but Dereck Rodriguez fell off a bit in September, and that was enough to keep him out of consideration for the third slot on ballots. Right-hander Walker Buehler of the Dodgers received 20 of the 30 third-place votes.
This has happened two consecutive years, and as our Ahmed Fareed pointed out, the Giants joined the Padres and Pirates as the only NL teams to not have a single MVP vote the past two seasons. It goes deeper, though.
Last year, the Giants at least had a Gold Glove winner in Brandon Crawford. Buster Posey won the Silver Slugger Award at catcher last season, too. But in 2018, the Giants were shut out of those announcements as well.
Crawford failed to win a Gold Glove for the first time since 2014. Posey was shut down in August, ending any shot at awards. Madison Bumgarner is normally a threat for the Silver Slugger (which he's won twice), but he batted just .159.
San Francisco Giants
The end result was that the Giants did not receive a single vote for any of the four major awards and also did not pick up a Gold Glove or Silver Slugger. There will be no pregame ceremonies of any kind next April, and that’s rare.
You have to go all the way back to 2007 to find a Giants team that didn’t get any recognition at all during awards season. Hunter Pence finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting that year -- for the Astros, who were still in the National League.
So, yeah, it’s been a long time since this has happened.