The Chris Moeller Archives

The Most Valuable Player

No Thanksgiving-themed post tonight. I tried coming up with a joke about the presidential pardoning of the turkey and waterboarding, but writing my own jokes is not my forte.

Instead, I wanted to share some baseball research I did today on-line after gorging on ham, potatoes, and green bean casserole (and perhaps entirely too much of the vino, judge for yourself.)

The Philadelphia Phillies' Ryan Howard is, by all accounts, a very nice man, and that he's a St. Louis native, it's intriguing to imagine that he might up and decide one day he wants to play for the Cardinals, but he should not have been the National League MVP in 2006. Albert Pujols should have won the prize, based on the fact that he was the only hitter in the circuit to finish in the top 5 in batting average, home runs, RBIs, runs, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage, the fact that he hit .397 with runners in scoring position to Howard's .256, and quite simply, because his team made the playoffs.

You know that I've argued before-- as recently as this month-- that the league playoffs should be included in the equation for league voting. And what is spectacularly bewitching this year is that, even though award voters knew at least who was in the playoffs and who was out when they cast their ballots, and even though wholly one-fourth of all NL teams now qualify for the playoffs (the highest percentage in history), the voters still chose to give the league's MVP, Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, and Manager of the Year awards to men whose teams sat out the month of October. It's mind-boggling.

These individual awards were not meant to be consolation prizes, people. In particular, the MVP was intended to reward the best player on the best team, just like the basketball tournaments where three of the all-tournament starting five inevitably come from the championship team. To the victor go the spoils. Only in extenating circumstances (.424 batting average, the Triple Crown, 70 home runs, etc.) should the opposite hold true.

I know we have a few strict Constitutional constructionists out there, so let's look at a little something called "original intent," i.e. the early interpretation of the MVP Award. (Only in the National League, though. Who cares about the American League? And I really do have a bloated stomach.) As I see it, 1969 was the beginning of the breakdown of order towards awarding the trophy to "the best player on the best team," and of course that year coincides with the breakup of the National League into two six-team divisions. This was the year that the powers-that-be had to make the decision-- Do we vote on the award at the end of the regular season, or do we stick with tradition and wait until the actual pennant has been decided? Unfortunately, they chose the former.

By my afternoon calculations (simple arithmetic polished at a state college,) 34 of 48 National League MVP awards given before 1969 went to players who played on the pennant-winning club. Between the reinstitution of the award in 1924 and 1968, an also-ran claimed the prize not even once every three years. But since 1969, the pennant-winning club boasted the MVP award winner on its roster only 12 times in 36 years. (I threw out 1979 because the prize was shared between one player for each side of the debate.) Shockingly, only twice in the last 15 years have the top team and top player award coincided (1999, Atlanta's Chipper Jones, and 2002, San Francisco's Barry Bonds.)

When will we stop this madness? When will fools stop making the argument that "the post-season has its own awards?" August has its own award. It's called "The Player of the Month for August." Does that mean that statistics compiled in the month of August shouldn't weigh in the post-season voting? If the playoffs would have been taken into consideration this season, the supposedly-jilted Yankee, Derek Jeter, would have received even fewer votes than he did, after he failed to take a leadership role during the A-Rod debacle and the resulting negativity suffocated his team out of contention.

And the voting sportswriters would have also had the chance to see that 2006 was destined to belong to Albert Pujols and the Cardinals, just as when the writers lucked out in 1988 and voted the prize to the Dodgers' eventual-post-season hero, Kirk Gibson. Howard may have put his mark on the season by belting a few more home runs than Pujols, and winning the All-Star Game Home Run Derby (a should-have-been-non-factor that many sportswriters strangely seem to be bringing up now in the justification of their Howard votes,) but Pujols carried his team to the ultimate flag. It's just downright goofy that the Cardinals would win dramatic pennants in both 2004 and 2006, but the MVP trophy in Albert's living room would be engraved "2005."

posted by CM @ 9:05 PM