Using a spreadsheet to pick award winners
 

Not all winners, just the top batter and pitcher awards.

• Select top six candidates based on OPS and Wins (yes, I am a traditionalist and relievers need to be filtered out).
  
• Rank the players in those categories and several others: 1 point for the worst in category up to 6 points for the best.
  
• Apply weight points to ranks in each category according to what I think are most to least important aspects of performance.
  
• Multiply ranking times weight to calculate weighted points.
  
• Add across and rank the totals. 1-2-3 are win, place, show.

Note that there was a tie for the National League Pitching Ace Award. Actually, Magee would have won the award if his HR/9 was a "pure" zero. He gave up 1 home run while O'Dwyer gave up none (it's 1906 in my game). The spreadsheet usually wouldn't show it - I calculated and entered three-decimal fractions for two guys who were showing "0.0" in the OOTPB report - but Magee's HR/9 was 0.025 and that one home run cost him the award, it was that close.

As time goes on, I will not have to deal with such minute numbers for HR/9 but this time, every decimal place counted. As it was, since they tied, I gave the award to O'Dwyer for his historic 30-game win season.

Feel free to pick this apart. I'm sure it's subject to all sorts of criticisms but I like it because it takes WAR out of the equation. I am not relying on the game to even present the candidates, much less choose the award for me. The game can do other awards on its own, subject to my review, but these "Big Two" deserve the spreadsheet approach. Fortunately, the data can be exported from customized views, copied, and pasted here.

While I will not be responding to commentary, I would be interested to see how other people handle this type of thing with spreadsheets. Please feel free to share your own methods.

I subsequently realized that the Pitching Ace spreadsheet was quite adaptable for the Fireman Reliever Award with the substitution of two categories. It's gratifying that the leader in the candidate selection category is not necessarily the one who wins the award. Cees Dennis was a much better reliever than Ryan Parker despite having half of Parker's saves.

Three awards (actually six, a set of three for each league) with no more head-scratching! :)

Side note: My gosh, look what Billy O'Dwyer had to do on the next-to-last day of the season in order to get that 30th win. (Remember, it's 1906 and I don't control the Doves. I don't think I would have pushed the envelope so far, considering the valuable goods involved, but that was the era.)

Hope O'Dwyer takes his offense out for ice cream since their hitting helped him beat the better pitcher for the pitching award.

I appreciate that you are trying to come up with a simple spreadsheet to determine best hitter/pitcher. There are so many formulas for different things it is mind blowing. Exit velocity, trajectory, spin speed, range factor, position adjustment, etc, etc, etc..

When I was kid, I would grab the sports section and look at box scores and the league leaders. For hitters, the showed batting average, home runs, stolen bases, runs and rbis. So I always thought runs and rbis were an important indicator of a players hitting ability until I joined an online strat league. I quickly discovered that in evaluating players for trade purposes, RBIs and runs mean absolutely nothing. Being a math nerd and wanting to improve Instead of destroying my team, I started reading articles at Baseball Prospectus and another site that was really helpful (but I do not remember the site name now) and my eyes were open. For hitting (not considering speed or defense) I came up with my own simple formula that I used to compare hitters. (2 times on base percentage) + (slugging).
For pitchers I do not use wins or ERA. I look at (walks+hits)/IP and look at home runs allowed and strike outs.
Anyway, this works for me but use whatever you are comfortable with.

I hear you. The thing about these spreadsheets - well, any spreadsheet - is that I could either swap the categories for others or weight them differently. As long as there are enough to capture the player's overall performance (not including defense in my case but that was a choice).

I tried to use the categories and weights that appealed to me most and, like I said in the OP, I am a bit of a traditionalist. So, I was not completely comfortable with Jacob deGrom winning the CY Award last year with a record of 10-9 (at least above .500!). I would have given the award to Miles Mikolas but it seems everybody focused on deGrom's ERA. Which was spectacular, I admit.

The object of the game is to win ballgames and the starting pitcher used to be key to that end. Now, of course, the era of winning 20+ games is virtually over and we are seeing pitching by committee. I prefer the Baseball that I grew up with, including 300 game winners.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Reed.

Almost 3 runs per nine innings scored when Mikolas pitched
Less than 2 runs scored per 9 innings when DeGrom pitched.

But because the Cardinals scored 5.6 runs per game when Mikolas pitched and the Mets scored 3.7 runs when DeGrom pitched, Mikolas was the better pitcher.

Makes complete sense

Like if Deja Bru and I were batting lead off and clean up for the Cardinals, stymieing their offense, and defense, it would mean Mikolas was a worse pitcher.