Welcome to an afternoon edition of Airbrushed Fridays. While people are still getting worked up about Mike Trout being snubbed in the MVP vote in favor of the first Triple Crown winner in 45 years, I present to you another example of why the entire awards thing is a farce. It's not worth getting worked up over when it's this ridiculous, you know.
Who is this week's victim, and why do we care? Okay, I don't know much about this Twitter thing, but check this out. Since the link probably won't make sense after a couple of days, I took a screenshot.
So, Raul Ibanez, a 40 year old part time outfielder (384 ABs) with more or less an average OPS for a 4th outfielder/DH type, gets an MVP vote. Granted, it's a 10th place vote, but apparently there were only 9 players in the entire American League more valuable last year than a guy that spends half his time on the bench? I don't want to sell Raul short. He had a very nice and very long career. He may not even be done with the game at his age. That's great. I just don't think they short put sportswriters in charge of anything anymore.
Why does this card exist? Ibanez had his worst season as a full-time player at age 39 and the Phillies were done with him by the time 2012 rolled around. The Yankees signed him as a free agent. He had a nice little playoff run and stepped in for the perpetually disappointing Alex Rodriguez and hit some HRs.
Airbrushed Fridays is a weekly feature as the name seems to imply. If you know of a card with an altered photograph that you'd like to see featured, please contact me. You probably won't win anything other than a hyperlink and a "writing" gig for Bleacher Report, but you never know!
Ibanez hit incredibly important home runs in two games in September (one against Oakland, one against Boston) that were basically the difference between the Yankees winning the division and being a maybe-wild-card. I'm guessing the writer was taking a very narrow view of "valuable". I wonder if Bucky Dent got any MVP votes in 1978?
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