Clint Hurdle was robbed! A third-place finish in the National League manager of the year voting? After the way the Rockies stormed back?

Except ...

There was no way to rank the NL candidates without badly slighting somebody.

Go this way -- 1. Hurdle; 2. Arizona's Bob Melvin; 3. Philadelphia's Charlie Manuel -- and the man who guided his team to the NL West title finishes behind the man who guided his team to a wild-card berth. And Manuel, the man who re-wrote the failure of the '64 Phillies by overtaking the Mets in the season's final 17 days, is completely dissed.

Go this way -- 1. Melvin; 2. Hurdle; 3. Manuel -- and the Phillies' manager gets the shaft again.

No, in a fascinatingly unusual NL season, despite the Rockies' great comeback, Melvin and Manuel have to rank one-two, however you split them up. Personally, I would have had Manuel as the winner because of the way he steered his team past the New York Mets, who were prohibitive favorites not only in the NL East, but for the NL pennant. Plus, there is no place more difficult to manage than Philadelphia, where Phillies' fans go ballistic when a losing streak reaches, say, two games.

Melvin, though, is certainly deserving. Few saw a 90-win season coming last spring, and if you would have learned then that the Diamondbacks would be playing most of the season without Randy Johnson, it would have gotten even worse.

"I thought it would be more difficult," Melvin said on a conference call Wednesday in reference to learning of Johnson's injury earlier in the season. "If someone in spring training said we'd have 90 wins, we would have taken it."

Melvin squeezed every last bit out of his Diamondbacks until they ran out of juice against Hurdle's Rockies in the NLCS. (And as you know based on this week's AL Cy Young voting -- Cleveland's C.C. Sabathia over Boston's Josh Beckett -- this voting takes into account only the regular season).

"Just to be considered for me is an honor," Melvin said. "Anytime you have one of 30 jobs as a big league manager and the likes of Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox are in your league, it's an honor to win it."

Melvin also called it "a little bit embarrassing" simply because it "takes a bunch of people to get the organization going in the right direction."

The AL winner, Cleveland's Eric Wedge, was pretty much as expected. No drama there. Biggest noteworthy item is that it's the first time ever that an Indians' skipper was named manager of the year. That's a pretty stark commentary on all of those down decades in Municipal Stadium.

"I didn't realize it until today," Wedge said. "It's a great honor. I think of how much respect I have for a manager at the major-league level, how much goes with that responsibility. ..."

Both Wedge and Melvin are former catchers, which made Wednesday another banner day for catchers-turned-managers.

"A catcher has to be aware of every aspect of the game," Wedge said. "Offense, defense, pitching, emotionally he has to be a leader. You have to really work hard at your personality, pushing the club in the right direction. There's more that a catcher needs to be involved with than arguably any other player on the team.

"That allows that transition to be natural."

Likes: So Alex Rodriguez and his people talked with the Yankees on Wednesday. Despite the rancor of two weeks ago, do not be surprised if A-Rod winds up back in pinstripes. There remain very few teams that can afford him -- the Yanks, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Angels and perhaps Cubs -- which will limit his negotiating power. Even with Scott Boras as his agent. And even if Texas is no longer on the hook to pay a portion of A-Rod's salary if he returns to New York, there remain any number of creative ways to craft the contract. ... HBO's documentary on the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry this week. ...

Dislikes: Santa Ana winds and fires.

Rock 'n' Roll Lyric of the Day

"My father said, 'Son, we're
"Lucky in this town
"It's a beautiful place to be born
"It just wraps its arms around you
"Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone

"You know that flag
"Flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
"Who we are, what we'll do
"And what we won't"

-- Bruce Springsteen, Long Walk Home

Based solely on October, you might be shaking your head and rubbing your eyes in disbelief right about now as you're reading how Cleveland's C.C. Sabathia topped Boston's Josh Beckett for the American League Cy Young Award on Tuesday.

But based on the regular season ... and armed with the knowledge that ballots do not take into account the postseason ... the voting came out exactly as it should have.

C.C. ... Cinch for Cy.

At a glance, some of the numbers between Sabathia and Beckett were a coin flip -- such as Sabathia's 3.21 ERA (fifth in the AL) and Beckett's 3.27 (sixth) -- but what rightly shifted this election toward the banks of Lake Erie were Sabathia's old-school, major league-leading 241 innings and his grittiness in the face of a sometimes colossal lack of run support.

Had the Indians' bats not often been in hibernation when Sabathia was on the mound, he could have easily finished with 24 or 25 victories instead of a career-high 19 (Beckett collected 20).

While Sabathia was going 19-7, the Indians scored two or fewer runs in each of his seven losses. Twice he lost 1-0 decisions.

Yet he never complained, and he resisted the urge to do any kind of public exorcism on his teammates' bats. He simply took the ball the next time out and turned in another seven or eight innings of high-quality work.

Which is another reason Sabathia is deserving of this award: Without verbalizing it, he essentially produced a classic "Climb on my back and I'll carry us to the finish line" type of season. The Indians won the AL Central title thanks in large part to Sabathia and his co-ace, Fausto Carmona, but talk to those inside the Cleveland clubhouse and they'll tell you it was Sabathia's leadership and steady presence that might have been the most important ingredient in this championship mix.

"I've definitely matured as a person this year, and I've matured more as a player," Sabathia told me in September. "I'm keeping my emotions under control, trying to separate each game, trying to control what I can control."

While he just missed becoming Cleveland's first 20-game winner since Gaylord Perry in 1974, he does become the first Cleveland pitcher since Perry in 1972 to win a Cy. The two are the only Indians in the 52-year history of the award to have won it.

Oh, and if you want more numbers, chew on this: Sabathia's strikeouts-to-walks ratio was phenomenal this season -- 209-37 -- becoming the second-best for a left-hander in baseball history.