AL LVP (LEAST VALUBLE PLAYER): Yunel Escobar
It's now 27 months since the Blue Jays made the Braves' day by trading for the talented but troubled Yunel Escobar. Well, it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. In fact, it even seemed like a brilliant idea as recently as 12 months ago, after Escobar had finished hitting .290 with a .782 OPS and the best on-base percentage (.369) of any shortstop in the whole darned American League. But that was last year. This year? Yikes.
Guess who has had the worst OPS (.644) of any qualifying AL shortstop? Right you are. Yunel Escobar. And guess who has had the fewest extra-base hits (32) and created the fewest runs in that group? Yep, same guy. But this is one LVP candidacy that's bigger and uglier than any numbers. Ask the people around this club who grumble that "Yunel Escobar finds a way to do something stupid every game." Ask the scouts who use words such as "disgusting" to describe his daily lack of focus and commitment. Ask the baseball man who says: "I think he actually enjoys ticking people off with the things he does. He knows he ticks them off, and he does it anyway." Or ask all the people he offended when he etched a homophobic slur into his eye black -- and then acted as if he hadn't done anything particularly offensive. So what we have here is a guy who has hit the LVP daily double: He's been a lousy baseball player -- and a worse act.
AL CY YUK: Ricky Romero
A year ago this time, if you could have bought stock in one young left-handed starter in the entire American League, there's a good chance you'd have invested in Ricky Romero, Inc. And what if you had? Ummmm, you'd be wishing about now that you'd bought Facebook. That's what.
Because a funny thing happened to Romero this year on his way to acehood: The league figured him out. It doesn't do much good to have one of the great changeups on earth if you never get ahead with any of your other stuff. And that's been the story of Romero's shockingly disastrous season. He owns the worst walk-to-strikeout ratio (105 walks, 124 whiffs) of any qualifying starter in baseball. (In fact, it's the third-worst ratio in the past 15 seasons among AL starters with 100 or more strikeouts.) He also owns the highest ERA (5.77) and WHIP (1.67) of any qualifying starter in baseball. And that wouldn't be good no matter what the heck was happening around him. But in Romero's case, what was happening was that about 46 other Blue Jays pitchers were heading for the disabled list.
And just when they needed him most, to keep the season from capsizing, he managed to go 15 consecutive starts without a win -- and couldn't even claim bad luck, considering he went 0-13 with a 7.42 ERA and .898 opponent OPS in that stretch. He lost 13 times in 14 trips to the mound at one point. And you want to know how tough that is? Only one other AL starter in the 52-season expansion era has ever done that (Mike Parrott, of the 1980 Mariners). So it ain't easy. With this guy's ability, he could easily get himself back on the CNBC "Buy" list by next year this time. And who knows? Maybe, after he wins his first Cy Young, he'll even attribute it to everything he learned from this horrifying outbreak of Cy Yukkiness.