The Gold Gloves pretty much lost all legitimacy when Rafael Palmeiro won for his slick first base skills in a season where he was DH for almost the entire year but it’s always interesting to see the absurdity of some of the winners. The biggest issues with Gold Gloves is that they are really biased in favor of incumbency (Sizemore, Ichiro and Hunter are examples of this), and that they generally get awarded to people who are superior hitters. Which is ridiculous as they are fielding awards.

I’ve broken them out further using my own subjective means into three categories: Good choices, not terrible choices, and those who make no sense:

Overall, not really bad as it could be. Although Beltre isn’t a huge slugger (anymore) he benefits from the incumbency brain disaster, which is good for him as he is pretty much the best fielding 3B in baseball! Everyone who falls under "okay" isn’t the best choice, but obviously isn’t a terrible one. No means no, as you may have heard in high school.

Addressing the "Nos", briefly:

1. Nate McClouth was a really bad Center Fielder by pretty much every metric except fielding percentage/errors, which is what winds up being important to the guys who make the Gold Glove decisions (managers and coaches–that’s right, guys like Joe Torre are the ones who decide this).
2. Michael Young is a pretty below average shortstop and even though the AL shortstop fielding class is pretty thin it’s clear that either Orlando Cabrera or Jason Bartlett should have been given the thing.
3. I know everybody loves Ichiro but he is not one of the three top fielding outfielders in baseball this year. And he wasn’t last year either. Alex Rios deserves it more than any of the three who won it but especially Ichiro. Here it seems to be simply a matter of celebrity and reputation–Rios lead Ichiro in allt he things that voters look at like Fielding Percentage and Outfield Assists.
4. Adrian Gonzalez is not a terrible fielder, but Albert Pujols is so much better than him, that it makes this pick terrible. I don’t know if it’s because Pujols is so good at everything baseball related or what but he really gets stiffed all the time.

In a nutshell, everyone knows that the Gold Gloves are sort of dumb but there have been worse decisions than this year’s winners.

You can (and should) also read Joe Posnanski’s look at this thing because he does a much better job than me of analyzing the blips in the results.

Here is today’s Front Page:

If that wasn’t stupid enough, they also published this oh-so hilarious and entertaining graphic sidebar with the article:

I know that the Post is really a rag but it is horrible to me that they publish stuff you would expect to find on a Rivals board.