Decisions, Decisions: Down Ballot Weirdness in the late 1970s

While writing the Friday Stuff edition last week, I came across the odd fact that Mark Fidrych wasn’t the unanimous winner of the American League Rookie of the Year Award in 1976. I couldn’t recall any other rookie making much of an impression that season, so when I scrolled down the list of voting results and found out two voters thought Butch Wynegar had a better season, it struck me in two different ways. First, I recognized that it was a pretty harmless little fact since Fidrych correctly won the award anyway. Simultaneously it struck me as utterly preposterous since there’s simply no way Butch Wynegar had a better year than Mark Fidrych in 1976.

So I decided to go hunting for similar down ballot weirdness that struck me the same way. Where were some really strange votes cast that didn’t impact appropriate winners of awards?

As it turns out, that’s happened a lot. Like, A LOT. It’s happened so often, in fact, that I never got out of the late 1970s before having enough content for this edition. Watch for some future editions where I cover other periods of baseball history, because the last few years of the 70s were chock-full of strange votes all by themselves.