The AL MVP vote was announced yesterday, and to my surprise, the voters again did a decent job. It was an extremely close "race". There were a good many good choices but no clear-cut, obvious choice. If you use Win Shares to evaluate the candidates, Gary Sheffield has a slight edge over Vladimir Guerrero (31 to 29). If you use VORP, Guerrero had a tremendous lead over Sheffield (93.2 to 63.8). If you split the difference, as I did in my IBWA ballot, you give the nod to Guerrero, which is basically what the voters did.

OK, move along. There's not much to see there. No Mo Vaughn or Juan Gonzalez type misappropriation of hardware to get our hackles up. Oh, dang!

My hackles at least had some bête noires to at least occupy themselves. To wit, Chone Figgins got two votes. Two baseball analysts thought that the Angels super reserve player was one of the top ten players in the American League. These are the people who cheer for Super Joe McEwing, Jose Oquendo, Luis Aguayo, and Little Louie Giammona and pooh-pooh Barry Bonds total domination.

Heck, the preeminent analyst, John Kruk, picked Figgins as his AL MVP. I've already gone over why that's misguided.

Then there's the sect that believes that relievers should be represented in the MVP vote but not the Cy Young vote because they are "everyday players". But I think it's a silly argument since if the reliever were truly that valuable, he'd be a starter and then wouldn't be "eligible" for the MVP vote.

Anyway, Joe Nathan, Francisco Cordero, Mariano Rivera received some support. Of the three only Rivera is a truly great closer. Nathan may be a one-year wonder. Cordero was good but probably wasn't more than the 5thor 6th most valuable Ranger.

It all got me to thinking about who were the worst players in baseball history to receive an MVP vote or a vote for any other award for that matter. I'll call the MVP version the Zolio award for Zoilo Versalles, and his one glaringly odd MVP award in the min-Sixties.

The Zolios

First, how do we assess the worst players? What stats should we use? Do we evaluate them based on the season in which he received the odd vote or over his entire career?

Well, let's start with OPS for batters and ERA for pitchers. Here are the players who received an MVP vote with the worst career OPS. The first and last years in which they received a vote and their cumulative MVP points, 1st-place votes, and maximum available points are also listed:

Now here are the worst pitchers:

However, This may not be the fairest way to compare players across different eras. What if we try again using Win Shares as the criterion? Here are the worst by career WS:

Now for the lowest single-season Win Share total to be rewarded with an MVP vote:

By the way, Figgons (28 career WS) just missed the career list.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at the Charboneaus (worst Rookie of the Year vote getters), the Vuckoviches (Cy Young), and the Buddies (Manager of the Year).