Who gets picked for baseball’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards each season is rarely as interesting as the “why”.
Voters from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America tend to get pulled in two directions. They pick a guy with the best pure numbers or they pick a guy with decent numbers who elevated his team to a superior level.
That is why, historically, players with stellar statistics on last-place teams such as Andre Dawson (1987) and Alex Rodriguez (2003) can win MVPs, and so can Justin Morneau (2006), who was a good hitter on a first-place Minnesota Twins team but did not come close to leading the league in anything.
When voters come to the fork in the road, they take it.
No doubt, the same tug of war — or should we say WAR (Wins Above Replacement, one of the sport’s favourite modern statistical formulas) — will play out this season.
The debate is keener in the National League, where Bryce Harper’s 6.8 WAR (FanGraphs rating) tops all of baseball.
He leads the league in home runs, on-base percentage and slugging.
But his team, the Washington Nationals, have fallen woefully short of high expectations and will have to rally to make the post-season.
That leaves the MVP door open to a large field of candidates. Harper even has some competition on the numbers front, from the under-appreciated Paul Goldschmidt, who has been hammering the ball in the overlooked desert outback of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and pitcher Zack Greinke of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose 13-2 record and 1.58 earned-run average match up favourably with teammate Clayton Kershaw’s 2014 MVP season.
Goldschmidt is the only player besides Harper with an OPS (on-base plus slugging) better than 1. But his team is mediocre, which brings into the picture Buster Posey of the San Francisco Giants, Anthony Rizzo of the Chicago Cubs and Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates — all celebrated catalysts for contending teams.
Posey, Rizzo and McCutchen are not quite in Harper-Goldschmidt-Greinke territory, statistically, but they are the best hitters on strong teams and remain attractive to voters who take the “V” in MVP most seriously.
In the American League, three bombers have separated themselves from the pack, including Nelson Cruz of the Seattle Mariners. His AL-leading 36 home runs and .606 slugging mark are eye-popping for someone who plays half of his games in the hitting-unfriendly cavern of Safeco Field.
But Cruz’s team is going nowhere this season, and his glove is a piece of leather that never should have left the steer. His pedestrian defence leaves his WAR at 4.7, nowhere near the other two stat titans, reigning MVP Mike Trout (6.7) of the Los Angeles Angels and Josh Donaldson (6.7) of the Toronto Blue Jays, both defensive wizards.
Donaldson’s numbers (MLB-leading 89 runs, 91 RBI) are inflated, thanks to the stacked Blue Jays line-up and Toronto’s cozy ballpark. But he also has the Jays on the cusp of their first post-season in 22 years. This is the fourth consecutive year Trout has had MVP-worthy numbers (33 HRs, .977 OPS), and the Angels are in the play-off reckoning.
A prediction? Look for NL voters — with too many choices — to go with the top numbers guy, Harper. And in the AL, they will pick “valuable” — Donaldson leading the Blue Jays, finally, to the promised land.
Two MVPs, two paths.
Pitchers an urgent priority for Dombrowski
The highlights on Ben Cherington’s four-season resume as general manager of the Boston Red Sox were as enviable as anyone’s.
He won a World Series in 2013, groomed a core of standout young regulars who now grace the line-up and stocked a farm system that ranks among the best in baseball.
Unfortunately for him, those unsightly last-place finishes in 2012 and 2014, and the one they are working on this season, don’t look so good. In Boston, they expect a decent team playing meaningful games in September every year. Three boring summers out of four doesn’t cut it.
This week, the Red Sox hired Dave Dombrowski — the former Detroit Tigers executive who was fired just two weeks ago — as president of baseball operations in place of Cherington, who decided to resign when the transition is complete.
Cherington’s 2015 follies were painfully predictable. Red Sox fans watched with disbelief over the winter as he filled the starting staff with back-of-the-rotation pitchers. What? How does that work? It was stunningly myopic.
Dombrowski, 59, who built winning teams in Montreal, Florida and Detroit, was being courted by several teams. Boston is lucky to get him. Dombrowski, in turn, is lucky to land in deep-pocketed Boston with Cherington’s large stable of prospects at his disposal.
It really should be difficult to blow the opportunity, but we will give Dombrowski a hint, anyway: Dave, get some decent pitchers.
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