Sports
Sportswriter Hands Out Hardware For Best Vibe, Most Improved Attitude, Nicest Handshake
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
Jeff Passan, who covers baseball for ESPN with the energy of a man who has been awake since 1987 and intends to stay that way, has released his annual collection of MLB end-of-season awards, a tradition in which the MVP race and the Cy Young Award are set aside so that Passan can recognize the players who made him personally feel understood.
The awards, published in a piece that runs longer than most labor agreements, include categories such as Best Story, Most Valuable Role Player, and what Passan describes as the Breakout Performer of the Year, which is different from Rookie of the Year in ways that are explained across four paragraphs and remain unclear at the end of them.
There is no trophy. There is no ceremony. There is no plaque, no podium, no engraved crystal. There is a paragraph, and then another paragraph, and then a quote from the player's manager about work ethic.
"This is about recognizing the full breadth of what makes a baseball season meaningful," Passan wrote, in a sentence that could have been generated by a machine trained exclusively on award show acceptance speeches. "Sometimes the most important story isn't the one being told at the podium."
The podium, it should be noted, is the one Passan built himself, for an award he invented, in an article he assigned to himself.
Not every category is purely vibes-based. One award goes to a reliever, which is arguably a real thing a reliever did. Another goes to a utility player described as "quietly essential," which is the sportswriting equivalent of giving someone a participation ribbon and calling it an honor. A third goes to a player for handling adversity gracefully, a category so broad that roughly four hundred active roster players qualified and Passan just picked the one he liked.
Sources close to the situation confirmed that none of the recipients were informed in advance, that several learned about the award from Twitter, and that at least one had already moved on with his life.
"It means a lot," said a player who was told about the honor during a phone interview he appeared to have agreed to without knowing what it was for. "I just try to go out there every day and compete."
This is the correct answer. This is always the correct answer. Nobody has ever said anything else.
The piece does briefly acknowledge the MVP and Cy Young races before explaining why those awards, voted on by professionals with ballots and accountability, are less interesting than whatever Passan is doing here. The actual award winners, selected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, are mentioned in the same tone a restaurant uses to describe a competitor's menu.
Passan has been doing this for years. Every year the categories multiply. Every year the criteria get more personal. Every year there is a section called something like The Unsung Heroes, which is journalism's way of saying these are the guys I wanted to write about who did not do quite enough to justify writing about them.
The awards have no retroactive history, no criteria committee, no appeals process, and no mechanism by which a player can refuse one, which seems like an oversight.
The real MVP and Cy Young Award winners will be announced by the BBWAA on a schedule, using a process, with votes that exist. Jeff Passan will be there to explain what those voters missed.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/49998078/mlb-2026-passan-regular-season-awards-crow-armstrong-alvarez-misiorowski-schlittler