Tim Kurkjian, 17 year voter, on with Charley Steiner

"This is our reward for covering all the games we did," Tim Kurkjian on the vote remaining exactly as it is. Qualified writers are dropping from their ranks everyday, but that doesn't bother him. Tim says several times that it's "difficult, harder than you'd think, not easy," and Charley agrees but says that's not the point. There's no written rationale for each vote in one place permanently. No accountability. Yet we're allowed to see tears, extended families wrenched with emotion, some who win, others who lose, deserving players slapped in the face & sent to their room without explanation.

• Kurkjian thinks this is a reward and that he has earned it.

The reward is that voters themselves are talked about. People who've chosen careers as a paid parasites become famous because they have secrets. Baseball is now on radio 24 hours a day, 365 days a year along with just about any amount of information on the internet that a baseball analyst could need. Tim mentions a big flap came up at the last BBWAA meeting: THE WRITERS AT MLB.COM WERE STOMPING THEIR FEET, WANTING TO GET IN ON THE VOTE, but the "regular writers" said no, many of you guys are too closely related to the team. In New York a baseball writer's first priority is to get on ESPN. If he reports on the Yankees his other priorities are to get Yankee management to use them to attack a Yankee player in the press and to get a Yankee player to say or do something that could be used to humiliate him or cause controversy. If he is selected once every few years to vote in a post-season baseball award, he will help his career by not voting the Yankee player #1, such as one did in 2006 by not voting Jeter #1 for MVP. Bud Selig likes that. Assuming for a moment a writer liked the Yankees and not the Mets, he would gain nothing from the team for a vote, not least because Yankee management (to the extent it exists) is fragmented and focused elsewhere. It would be better for one's long term career prospects to withhold immortality from Yankee players (other than Arod). There are few enough ballots in AL awards that outcomes are easy to pad and manipulate up or down. It may be different in other markets. The point is, "being too close to a team" can't often be policed. And how does a "biased" human being transform overnight to a model of purity and morality simply by being told by Jack O'Connell that he has a vote? How exactly does that happen?

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