Go Galaxy!

Whooooaaaa!!!! We won!!

I guess, if you love soccer that much, you might sound like that.

Like the NFL, the championship game in Major League Soccer is on a rotating location set up, and this year the Home Depot Center in Carson, a ten minute drive up the 405 from here in Long Beach, played host to the MLS Cup championship game. (Next year the insanity ends, and the team in the final with the better record gets home field advantage.)

Our very own LA Galaxy played the Houston Dynamo, and were victorious, winning 1-0. For the third time in my life, a champion has won their sport's ring while I was living in the city of their home. Giants, Yankees, and Galaxy, baby!

So, that's about all I have for soccer, mainly because I don't feel like going into the Beckham will he stay or go nonsense, or about how awesome the Irishman Robbie Keane is or about how awesome the final MVP and most famous US player, Landon Donovan, is.

In other LA sports news, Clayton Kershaw won the National League Cy Young Award, signifying him as the best pitcher in the NL, which was a good choice. Matt Kemp came in second to the Brewers' Ryan Braun for NL Most Valuable Player, which was lame if not controversial. I guess if the Dodgers had the best pitcher and best player, maybe they shouldn't have been so mediocre. Maybe those two players kept them mediocre instead of awful.

In any case, there has been some squawking about Justin Verlander winning both the AL Cy Young Award and the AL MVP. Pitchers occasionally win both, but only in years when they were particularly dominant and their wasn't an obvious position player who should have won. For Verlander this year: check and check.

I typically don't have a problem with pitchers winning the MVP, at least constitutionally as some of these guys I hear on the radio on the way to and from work do.

My question to those who are upset about a pitcher winning the MVP (that's what the Cy Young is for, they say) is, this year, which position player meant more to their team than Verlander meant to the Tigers? The only three guys who are even close are Curtis Granderson, of my Yankees, and Jacoby Ellsbury, of the Red Sox, and Jose Bautista, of the Toronto Blue Jays. I wouldn't have even suggested Ellsbury before seeing the final tally, in which he took second place.

To me Ellsbury shouldn't win because he wasn't dominating like a Babe Ruth or a Willie Mays on a horrible team; he was good on a team that choked like crazy over the last month of the season. Not leading a team to the playoffs isn't an MVP dealbreaker, but being part of a choking team is more glaring for me. Jose Bautista was a journeyman chump who, suddenly in 2010, learned how to hit homers like McGuire and Sosa, and we're cynical enough now to have reservations about sudden power surges. His value on a mediocre team is tied to his home runs, which shouldn't be enough to make someone an MVP.

Curtis Granderson was the best player on a playoff team and led the league in homers and RBIs while playing a premium defensive position, center field. He would've been my bet for MVP, but there were a few factors going against him: anti-Yankee bias in the MVP voting circles; and a plethora of talent around him protecting his position in the lineup--Robinson Cano, Teixeira, A-Rod, Jeter.

Should Verlander have won the MVP? It's not the worst choice. He was totally dominant after his no-hitter in June on, carrying the Tigers from distant second place at the time all the way to the divisional crown handily a few short months later. His attitude--big game dominant force--helped define the Tigers down the stretch, and if that doesn't make him the most valuable player on his team, and as an extension, the league, then I don't know how that award works.