I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, but after receiving 27 of 28 First Place votes in the balloting (what’s with that Japanese guy voting for Miguel Cabrera anyway?!?!?), Twins’ Catcher and uber-Minnesota sports idol Joe Mauer, is your 2009 American League Most Valuable Player.

The most coveted of the season’s Awards is the exclamation point on a season where he also took home the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards at the Catcher position in the AL.

For the season, Mauer batted .365 (1st in MLB), with an On-Base Percentage of .444 (1st in MLB), and slugged .587 (1st in AL, 3rd in MLB). He also added career high’s in HR’s with 28, and RBI’s with 96, all while missing the entire month of April with a back injury. (Obscure Stat I’d like to point out: Mauer’s 191 hits for the season in 138 games, was good for 9th in MLB, in 113 less At-Bats than the League’s Hit’s leader Ichiro Suzuki, with 225. Project Mauer’s average to the same number of At-Bats, and you get 233 hits).

Oh, by the way, in the era of ‘Sabermetrics’ and all the other crazy statistics (Which I don’t think hold any quantifiable value, like ‘Revised Zone-Rating’) that don’t take into account the difficulty of plays and how they actually happen on the field, Mauer won the Triple Crown in the AL with his line of .365/.444/.587.

He is also the 1st Catcher in MLB History to do a ridiculous amount of things this season when it comes to his statistics, but I’ll let the links at the end give you all that crazy information.

Bottom Line, Joe Mauer had one of the best, if not THE best, season’s EVER offensively for a Catcher in Major League Baseball, and the MVP Trophy is the icing on the cake for an incredible season where he flirted with .400 for over half the year and was a force down the stretch to help push the Twins into the playoffs.

In closing, my favorite memory of Joe’s 2009 season came in his first game, in his first 2009 at-bat, where on his very first swing of the season, he hit a HR over the left field fence at the Metrodome. Second’s later I received a text message from a friend that read only “He would”. So true.

Congrats Joe! Hopefully it is the first of many over an already prolific career!

Links:

-The M & M boys these days aint from New York, but now fellow MVP’s (which makes them the M^2 & M^2 Boys) Mauer and Justin Morneau, are much more than just teammates.

-La Velle E. Neal III examines Mauer’s season and the legacy he is creating.

-Joe Christensen takes a look at all the factors coming into play in regards to keeping Mauer in Minnesota beyond 2010.

-When Mauer was drafted in 2001, many sportswriters/fans in Minnesota cried foul for passing on pitcher Mark Prior to take the hometown kid #1 and save money. Patrick Reusse of the Star Tribune was one of them, and admits here, that they were all “morons”.

-To add to his list of accolades, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman named a day in his honor.

-ESPN’s Jim Caple, takes a humurous, Minnesota native Coen Brother’s inspired movie look, at the saga that will be Joe Mauer’s next contract negotiations.