Cy Yawn Award: Do we really care about the BBWAA awards?

The votes have been counted, the results are in, and the winners have been announced: the Tigers' own Max Scherzer and Miguel Cabrera are the 2013 Cy Young and MVP awards winners. This is the third year in a row that a Detroit Tiger has won the MVP, and the second time in the last three years that a Tiger has won the Cy Young Award.

In other news, the Tigers still haven't won a World Series title since the year "Ghostbusters" and Van Halen's "Jump" were Top Ten hits on the Billboard charts.

The question before us, looming like a giant elephant in the room, is "Who in the hell left an elephant in here?" Also, does it really matter that Tigers keep winning these awards when they haven't won a World Series in 30 years? And where did the remote control go, for crying out loud, it was sitting right here just last night?!

Some of these questions cannot be answered. Some of these questions should not be answered by anyone who is not professionally trained to waste page space by spewing a steady stream of fuzzy words that ultimately mean nothing, but still create a generally good feeling of being pandered to -- someone whose name rhymes with Ditch Dalbom.

There are basically two schools of thought here. The first school of thought says that this is a golden era of Tigers baseball, and we should enjoy it to the fullest, no matter what happens (or continually, repeatedly, year after year doesn't happen) in the postseason. The second school of thought would like to give the first school of thought a serious wedgie, because the only thing that matters from season to season is whether the Tigers actually capture a World Series trophy, and also because the first school of thought is prone to excess drinking.

Personally, I belong to a third school of thought, which is that -- after games two and six of the 2013 ALCS -- I will be happy just to be able to one day walk into a Denny's and order a "Grand Slamwich" without weeping and flipping my table over.

There's a certain cold logic to the reasoning, "Things could always be worse -- we could be watching a Tigers team like the one we saw in 2003, which was racing headlong towards a permanent place in the baseball Hall of Shame." Very true. But then again, it's irrelevant. This isn't the 2003 team, this is the 2011-2013 team that has been within a stone's throw of sealing the deal, but for some reason keeps belly-flopping between the Home Plate of World Series Glory and the Third Base of Close But No Cigar.

We don't have to settle for one or the other, either multiple BBWAA awards but no World Series, or a World Series but no awards. The last two times the Tigers conquered the baseball world, it was one of their pitchers who collected both the MVP and the Cy Young awards: Willie "Guillermo" "R-E-L-I-E-F" "Bill" Hernandez in 1984, and Denny "Those Aren't My Drugs I'm Just Holding Them For Someone Else" McLain in 1968. Of course, if that pattern meant anything, then the Tigers should have won the World Series in 2011, when Justin "Just Kidding It's October and I'm Fine" Verlander won both the MVP and Cy Young Award.

In the end, perhaps it's as simple as stating it this way: we're all justly proud of "our boys" Max and Miggy for picking up some extra hardware. But at the same time, those are personal accomplishments, not team accomplishments. The individual overshadows the collective in this case, and if -- just humor me for a minute -- Max Scherzer gets traded away next month, he'll still be "Max Scherzer, Cy Young Award Winner," even if he's no longer "Max Scherzer, starting pitcher for the Tigers."

The Tigers didn't win an MVP, Miguel Cabrera did. The Tigers didn't win a Cy Young Award, Max Scherzer did. And as long as they're both wearing the "D," we'll be proud of their accomplishments. But some of us -- the ones prone to excess drinking, I suppose -- want the award that goes to the team, that gets hoisted up on a flag in the stadium, the one that we fans get to claim for decades after the fact, after super-stars like Max and Miggy are long gone.

We want a damned World Series trophy.

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