LVP! LVP! LVP! LVP!

Mr. Wells capped off his impressive 2009 season by being awarded SI's Least Valuable Player Award to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

Wells had himself a spectacular campaign earning his 12.5 million dollars swatting 15 home runs, 66 RBIs, batting .247 with a .689 OPS. Combined with his rapidly detereiorating defense Vernon truly earned this honour.

Wells played like a superstar all year long, striking out and grounding out weakly while batting clean-up for almost half the season. He missed flyballs in centre, was booed emphatically by an angry fanbase, and at the end of the season revealed yet another hidden injury that he was too much of competitor to sit out and let heal.

Sarcasm aside, Wells is the most deserving resipient of this award, as soon as I saw the link to this article on FARK, with no indication of who "won" I just knew it would be V-dub getting the honour. 2009 as a year turned me very solidly against Vernon; maybe it was the underperformance of himself, maybe it was the underperformance of the team and maybe it was the fact that his contract has him pegged as the franchise player who is supposed to lead the club.

While Wells attempted to show leadership through his refusal to leave the lineup to heal, get shunted down the order to work out his hitting issues, or shift over to a position which he could adequately handle in the field these decisions just made him an alternative scapegoat for all the problems that plauged the 2009 Toronto Blue Jays. Because c'mon, sometimes you've gotta blame more than just Cito.

In a season loaded with negatives this "award" is just another another reminder of everything that went wrong in 2009, and makes the outlook for 2010 look bleaker by the minute. Summers of mediocre Blue Jays baseball are painful enough, a summer of outright spectacularly bad Blue Jays are enough to make me suicidal. With Ireland not qualifying for the World Cup this is gonna make for one hell of a painful summer for yours truly.