Best Nine Award

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The Best Nine Award is one of the awards given to players in Nippon Professional Baseball.

1 History
2 Voting criteria
3 Best Nine Award Records
4 External links

[edit] History

The award is given annually to the best player at each position in each league. Players are voted on by sportswriters, and if two players of the same position receive the same number of votes, the award is given to both players (Greg LaRocca and Masahiro Araki both received the Central League award at second base in 2004).

The award was established in 1940, and has been awarded each year since 1947. Though the naming comes from awarding the nine best players in each league, the Pacific League awards ten players each year, after adopting the designated hitter role in 1975.

In early Japanese baseball, players with exceptional fielding ability were given the award, (even if other players had far superior hitting numbers) but fielding was supposedly taken out of consideration in voting after the Japanese Golden Glove award was established in 1972.

The award can be thought of as the Japanese equivalent of the Silver Slugger Award, but in Japanese baseball, pitchers are not awarded based on their offensive ability (pitchers do not bat in the Pacific League, but the award is still given in the league each year). Another notable difference is that sportswriters are the voters for the Best Nine Award, whereas the Silver Slugger Award is voted on by managers and coaches. Some fans view the Best Nine Award purely as a popularity contest, rather than a legitimate award.

The same award is also given at the college level, in the Tokyo Big6 Baseball League.

[edit] Voting criteria

Since the voters are all media-related persons, voting results are often more reflective of overall impact in the mass media, rather than specific numbers. Players with more popularity are often awarded over more deserving players. For example, Japanese baseball icon Shigeo Nagashima won the award every single year of his career, even though he was clearly not the best third baseman in the league during the final stages of his career. Fans are often confounded by the voting results each year.

For example, here are the three Pacific League outfield winners for 1996 (bold indicates league leading number):

Ichiro Suzuki (Orix BlueWave) .356, 16 HRs, 84 RBIs, 35 steals
Arihito Muramatsu (Fukuoka Daiei Hawks) .293, 0 HRs, 38 RBIs, 58 steals
So Taguchi (Orix BlueWave) .279, 7 HRs, 44 RBIs, 10 steals

Other deserving outfielders in the league:

Tuffy Rhodes (Kintetsu Buffaloes) .293, 27 HRs, 97 RBIs, 11 steals
Koji Akiyama (Fukuoka Daiei Hawks) .300, 9 HRs, 66 RBIs, 13 steals

Rhodes and Akiyama both had better offensive numbers than Taguchi, (hits, HRs, RBIs, batting average, steals, and on-base percentage) but were not given the award. This was probably because the Orix BlueWave won the Japan Series in 1996; like the Japanese season MVP award, the Best Nine Award tends to favor players from championship teams. Ichiro is obviously deserving of the award for winning the batting title and leading the league in hits and on-base percentage, but Muramatsu's steals do not fully compensate for his mediocre average and very low power numbers. Rhodes was the offensive powerhouse for his team, recording the most HRs, RBIs, and highest batting average for the Buffaloes. It is also notable that all three winners had also won (or would go on to win) multiple Golden Glove awards, showing that fielding ability is still very much taken into consideration.