Kimbrel Takes Home Fourth Consecutive Goose Gossage Award

Perhaps the Baseball Bloggers’ Award for best reliever needs to be renamed.

For the fourth year in a row, Atlanta Braves closer Craig Kimbrel took home the hardware. Given that the award has only been in existence for five, there’s no contest on who the most decorated relief pitcher in BBA history is. This was actually the first year that Kimbrel was actually challenged, finishing just 11 points ahead of Cincinnati Reds closer Aroldis Chapman.

For the third consecutive year, Kimbrel posted an ERA under 1.75, though his 95 strikeouts was the lowest in a full year in his career. He led the league again in saves and put up an 227 ERA+, which was incredibly significantly lower than he had the last two years (399 and 311, respectively).

In the American League, New York reliever Dellin Betances, who also received votes for the BBA’s Willie Mays Award, edged out Kansas City reliever Wade Davis for the Gossage honors. Betances, who appeared in 70 games for the Yankees, put up a 1.40 ERA and a 277 ERA+ while striking out 135 in 90 innings.

The complete voting results are as follows (first place votes in parenthesis):

American League

Dellin Betances, New York (6) 50
Wade Davis, Kansas City (5) 47
Greg Holland, Kansas City (4) 27
Zach Britton, Baltimore 7
Sean Doolittle, Oakland 4

National League

Craig Kimbrel, Atlanta (7) 51
Aroldis Chapman, Cincinnati (5) 39
Kenley Jansen, Los Angeles (1) 15
Mark Melancon, Pittsburgh 7
Jonathan Papelbon, Philadelphia 3
Ken Giles, Philadelphia 1
Trevor Rosenthal, St. Louis 1

The Baseball Bloggers Alliance was formed in the fall of 2009 to encourage cooperation and collaboration between baseball bloggers of all major league teams as well as those that follow baseball more generally. As of this writing, the organization consists of 215 blogs spanning most of the 30 major league squads as well as general baseball writing.

The BBA is organized under a similar structure as the Baseball Writers of America, where blogs that follow the same team are combined into “chapters” and only two votes from the chapter on an award are counted. The blog chapters that are focused on general baseball were allowed two votes as well, which they could use both on the same league or split between the two leagues.

Chapters generally followed one of two methods when casting their ballot. Either representatives of the chapter were given the ballots for voting or a “group ballot” was posted, accounting for both of their votes.

Notably, though the Alliance’s awards come out well before their official counterparts, the BBA selections have matched those of the Baseball Writers of America in most cases in their history. This, of course, does not include the Goose Gossage Award that is exclusive to the BBA.

Ballots are posted on the respective blogs and for this award, were tabulated on a 5-3-1 point scale for first through third place. In the interest of transparency, links to the ballots are listed below.

Prior Winners:

2013: Koji Uehara, Boston; Craig Kimbrel, Atlanta
2012: Fernando Rodney, Tampa Bay; Craig Kimbrel, Atlanta
2011: Jose Valverde, Detroit; Craig Kimbrel, Atlanta
2010: Rafael Soriano, Tampa Bay; Brian Wilson, San Francisco

Official Ballots

American League
Boston Red Thoughts
The Tribe Daily
The Flagrant Fan
Misc. Baseball
North Dakota Twins Fan
TribeCards
Subway Squawkers
Patrick Mullin Training
Seattle Mariners Musings
The Blue Jay Hunter
500 Level Fan