"A non-numerical knock this season against the candidacy of Felix Hernandez was that, unlike most of the top candidates for the American League Cy Young Award, he pitched in no pressure games.

No argument there. By definition (with the exception of a season opener due to the presence of confetti, fireworks and hope), there are no pressure games in April, when the Mariners last were seen.

Once the flowers of May were dropped on the Mariners' competitive grave for 2010, Hernandez was free of any serious team-wide consequence that came with a poorly pitched game.

He had almost none.

Among all his feats in 2010, that may have been the most impressive. He never let the fetid mess in which he stood affect his deeds.

The idea that pressure of the pennant race defines the quality of player performance is one of the weirder little myths of sports.

If an athlete is good enough to be a major contributor to a team in the crucible, he's supposed to be at the acme of his ability. Pressure might affect a scrub thrown into the September fray, but by definition, a star is supposed to deliver.

So it seems a little odd to convey an ultimate seasonal award upon someone whose primary feat is to meet expectations on a successful team.

When a guy delivers for a tin-pot outfit as Hernandez did for the Mariners, that is eminently worthy of salute.

Fortunately, the members of the Pro Baseball Writers Association of America are a wise and insightful lot. Or maybe it's just that we're a tad smarter than we used to be.

The fact that Hernandez won only 13 games and was still recognized by writers as the game's best pitcher is a step forward in spreading the understanding of the game's subtleties. It's also about the only way an athlete in Seattle is going get some celebrity, because it isn't likely to be on the shoulders of team glory.

Creating significance by parsing Hernandez's accomplishments with statistical clarity is a necessary deed, given the Mariners' flaccidness, as well as the availability of data. So Hernandez owes some gratitude to the Mariners PR department as well as sabermetricians, those decimal demons who have managed to quantify everything in baseball down to TJORC (tobacco juice over replacement carcinogen).

But it wasn't altogether necessary to do a deep decimal dive to come to a conclusion about Hernandez's worthiness."