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Pedroia became only the third player ever to win the MVP the year after being Rookie of the Year–no thanks to one Evan Grant. Evan Grant was the only baseball ‘writer’ (and I use that term loosely) to completely leave Dustin Pedroia off his AL MVP Ballot.

Here is what Grant wrote on Monday:

I think the award should go to Youkilis. His offensive numberssave for overrated batting average, dwarfed those of Pedroia. When Mike Lowell got hurt, Youkilis moved from first to third and provided the Red Sox with excellent defense. And he led Boston back to the playoffs.

In other words, he epitomized MVP.

Dwarfed? Is that a short joke? Dustin is a gold glover who batted 2nd through 7th. That’s some versatility. Even more laughable is this statement from the same column:

When the AL MVP is announced today, Josh Hamilton is unlikely to land a first-place vote, but he’ll almost certainly be in every voter’s top five.

No, Grant. No. In fact only 1/4 of the voters had Josh Hamilton in their top five (7 out of 28).

In response to the obvious uproar making him look like a fool, Evan posted this to his Ranger’s Blog yesterday afternoon:

I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to actually post this, but I’ve been trying to answer e-mails and respond to phone calls about why I left Dustin Pedroia off the AL ballot. Let me first say this to the Red Sox nation: In retrospect, it was a mistake.

Here’s what I’ve been sending out as a semi-form note to lots of emails about why I voted the way I did.

Here is my full ballot:

Kevin Youkilis, Francisco Rodriguez, Justin Morneau, Josh Hamilton, Carlos Quentin, Alex Rodriguez, Cliff Lee, Joe Mauer, Grady Sizemore, Carlos Pena.

Did I perhaps get too “cute” at the bottom of the ballot? Yeah, probably. Was that a mistake? Yeah, probably. Was it a mistake to leave him out of the top five; in retrospect, yeah, it was. My colleagues all thought he belonged in the top five. My opinion on this one was obviously wrong. What I’m happiest about is that if my analysis was so wrong, at least it did not cost Pedroia the MVP award. I can assure you I give the MVP vote an awful lot of time. In this case, perhaps I gave it too much time and overanalyzed, particularly at the bottom of the ballot. In retrospect, it’s hard to argue that Pedroia wasn’t one of the 10 best players in the league.

But I will have you know that Pedroia was 18th in OPS, 27th in RBIs, 30th in batting average with runners in scoring position and 53rd in on-base percentage with runners in scoring percentage. I am aware he tied for the league lead in hits, led in runs scored and was second in batting average. But in the stats that to me suggest production and clutch hitting, he was dwarfed by the other players on the list.

Dwarfed again? This has to be some kind of bet that you have with your buddy that you can’t use ‘dwarfed’ in two consecutive Dustin Pedroia articles. The smug son of a gun also chose to use this picture of Dustin. What a jerkoff; this goes to show the disconnect that this guy has from the rest of the baseball world. No other writer had Pedroia lower than 4th. And, that was one person every other writer had him top 3! And this shlub didn’t even have him in the top 10!?