Since the 2009 Major League Baseball campaign is basically finished for all but 10 teams—the six division leaders, plus the two teams in each league with a legit shot at the wild card—it’s time to start wrapping stuff up. And so, not unlike the Democrats, we begin with the poor, the dumb, the downtrodden, the defenseless: We begin with the 2009 Pavano awards, which reverse-honor the season’s biggest, saddest loserheads.

B.J. Upton, Tampa Bay Rays

During the 2008 playoffs, he looked like a faster, better-conditioned version of Willie Mays. But after a slow recovery from shoulder surgery, Upton didn’t wake up until July. Since then, he has run the bases as if overmedicated and ranged after fly balls with the intensity of Tony Soprano fetching his morning paper. If there’s a better tough-love candidate in the game today, I don’t know who it is.

 

The Cubs got hurt and the White Sox got creative—which, owing to GM Ken Williams’ August shenanigans, might’ve been worse. It’s way cool that the guy is making high-risk moves (taking on two huge contracts in Jake Peavy and Alex Rios) at a time when everybody else is hoarding prospects like survivalists hoard canned peaches. At the same time, Williams has traded his team into a corner: the Sox won’t have much in the way of flexibility this off-season. As for the Cubs, it’s been one mess after another: the injuries (to a goodly chunk of the pitching staff, to Aramis Ramirez), the lethargy (Lou Piniella doesn’t bother much anymore with his bench or bullpen), the embarrassments (Milton Bradley and Alfonso Soriano chafing at their roles and batting-order placement, Carlos Zambrano showing up looking like he ate a single-A prospect and then complaining about being dubbed “lazy”), etc. Come October 5, the city will choose to pretend that the 2009 baseball season never happened.

 

Vernon Wells, Toronto Blue Jays

Big contract, small effort. He boasts the demeanor of a deposed county commissioner and the trade value of a bedbug-infested mattress. How he avoids nightly beer dowsings by the surprisingly surly Toronto fans, we’ll never know.

 

Manny Ramirez, Los Angeles Dodgers

His overall offensive numbers remain more than acceptable and his team may yet enjoy some October glory. But on the personal/legacy front, Manny took more of a hit this year than any player in the game. He was outed as a double flunker of tests for performance-enhancing substances, serving a 50-game suspension for one of them. Since his return, he’s been human at the plate and typically indifferent in the field—less the world-beater he was upon being dealt to the Dodgers last summer than the aging, one-dimensional batsmith he’s supposed to be at 37. Wait, that’d kind of make him Manny Being Granny. We made a funny! Hoy-o!

 

The Pirates received a healthy dose of so-bad-for-so-so-long flogging when they clinched their 17th consecutive losing season, but the Royals have lapped them as the league’s most harrowing cautionary tale. At least the Pirates know they’re terrible, wiping clean their roster (and payroll) of anyone over the age of 14. The Royals, on the other hand, preach the on-base percentage gospel, then go out and acquire Yuniesky Betancourt, who is to baseball what Courtney Love is to music. Thank GM Dayton Moore—who somehow scored a contract extension, leading most observers to believe he’s either blackmailing the owner or boinking his daughter—for making the mess messier via a series of moves that spat in the face of reason and then kicked dirt on its motionless corpus. Nobody here, from ownership on down, has anything resembling a clue.

 

Chris Young, Arizona Diamondbacks

For years, we’ve been hearing how Young ranks among the game’s preeminent centerfield prospects. We heard it when he was bouncing around in the lower reaches of the White Sox farm system and then again when he was lighting up the AAA night sky with his power, speed, arm, instincts and jaunty personality. After a monster rookie campaign and a reasonable if not electric follow-up in 2008, Young fell backwards, hard. He spent a chunk of August in the minors, either as punishment or as a last-gasp attempt to help him find his smile again. Regardless, he screwed many a fantasy-team owner across this great nation: as of this writing, he sits at .198 BA/12 HRs/34 RBIs. For that, he is deserving of our utter contempt.

 

Brad Lidge, Philadelphia Phillies

Closers are generally called upon to “close out” games, rather than extend their duration. A more apt title for Lidge, then, might be a “continuer”: Way too often this season, his contributions kept the game going, giving opponents another few whacks in extra innings or a reason to assemble in a joyous home-plate hogpile. It took Phillies manager Cholly Manuel until this week to tire of Lidge’s frequent sheet-soiling and remove him from ninth-inning duty. You could tell the skipper was pissed: he used the word “dadgum” multiple times while discussing it.

Ray Ramirez, New York Mets: Who is this guy, you ask? The head trainer for the majors’ achiest, breakiest franchise, the one that’s as able to diagnose a simple bruise or sprain as a pelican is to preside at a wedding. It’s unfair to blame Ramirez alone, as there were trained physicians who failed to diagnose injuries (“Did I say it was a twisted ankle? I meant to say that the hamstring was ripped off the bone and mangled, as if it’d been gnawed on by a ferret.") and players who withheld information about their physical condition. But there were way, way, way too many injuries for all of them to qualify as flukes, and that falls on the training and conditioning staffs.