MCB Goose Gossage Award Ballot

As a proud member of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, MCB has a vote this year for the Goose Gossage Award. As you might guess, this award names the top reliever in each league, each year. The BBA is set up much like the BBWAA in that blogs that cover American League teams will vote on AL awards only. Each MLB city is broken into chapters, and each chapter will have two official ballots to be cast in each award.

The Gossage Award will be voted upon this year by MCB and the Detroit Tigers Scorecard Blog, where Austin posted his ballot recently. This are the second annual BBA awards.  MCB’s official ballot follows after the jump.

3- Mariano Rivera, New York Yankees- Quite simply the greatest closer of our time, Rivera turned in yet another remarkable season in 2010. You would think that his 33 saves and 1.80 ERA would be enough to nab this honor, but I guess we are all just spoiled by his success. Just twice in Mo’s 16 year career has he posted an ERA of higher than 2.85. Twice.

2- Joakim Soria, Kansas City Royals- The Mexicutioner blew only three save chances all year and closed out 43 of Kansas City’s 67 wins. He posted an ERA of 1.78 on the season and struck out 71 batters in 65 innings. Can you believe the Dodgers released this guy six years ago? It’s true.

1- Rafael Soriano, Tampa Bay Rays- Soriano lead the league with 45 saves and stabilized a troublesome closer’s role for the Rays. He posted a 1.73 ERA and a WHIP of 0.802 in earning his first all-star selection. Soriano set career-best marks in wins, saves, games finished, and WHIP this season.

Because we have four writers on staff here, I polled the contributers before posting this ballot. Some interesting names came up in the discussion, but in the end, theses are the names that made the final cut.