Joe Mauer snares MVP American League award, but it's the second-best thing he'll receive in the next six months.
Joe Mauer was named the American League MVP today, in a vote that wasn't particularly close: he received 27 of the 28 first-place votes (Keizo Konishi of Kyodo News voted for the Tigers' Miguel Cabrera, according to the Associated Press.) and tallied 387 votes, outpacing the Yankees' Mark Teixeira and Derek Jeter. The award comes at the end of a pretty amazing season that saw Mauer miss the first month of the season with an injury, only to come back to win his third batting title in four years and leading the Twins to an improbable divisional title. His batting average of .365 was the highest ever for a catcher.
Still, we can't help but feel this will be his second-greatest accomplishment when his career is reviewed a decade or two down the line. Joe Mauer is the ultimate Local Boy, the kind of player every MLB team drools over. The St. Paul native has managed to carve out a superior career for the team he watched as a kid, and along the way his presence helped the Twins procure public financing and funding of a new ballpark, which opens next season. We're pretty sure that it won't take long before Target Field becomes known as The House That Joe Built.
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