the recent dumb dumb MVP results (cont.)

i liked murray chass' (morneau-defending) column yesterday, the headline of which calls new york "podunk, 10036":

Sad to think it, sad to say it, but the most cosmopolitan city in the country may be the most provincial. I have long thought that New York is a disappointingly provincial place, and the reaction among fans and the news media to the American League Most Valuable Player award last week is just the latest piece of proof.

What? Derek Jeter wasn’t named the most valuable player? How could that be? Horrors! What’s wrong with those baseball writers? Send them off to cover hockey, if that’s the best they can do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/sports/baseball/28chass.html

Murray Chass thinks Morneau was the MVP; nuff said.

Or played an impressive first base.

Or did anything particularly exceptionally actually.

:D

Obviously one thing Sabermetrics and the naysayers don't take into account is localized position/franchise factor, which is like park factors only a lot more mysterious and unexplainable. The fact that Twins first basemen have rarely been better than league average has been in effect for the franchise since the earliest days of the Senators, with a few notable exceptions -- Killebrew and Carew, who didn't exclusively play the position anyways, and Kent Hrbek, who was a fairly decent power hitter for a brief stretch but in retrospect is not someone you'd trade, say, Jack Clark for. Aside from that you had the workaday likes of Joe Judge, Mickey Vernon and Joe Kuhel, flashes-in-the-pan like Rich Reese and Zeke Bonura, all-field-no-hit guys like Doug Mientkiewicz, and huge lumps of awful like Scott Stahoviak and Julio Becquer. If you don't believe me when I say that playing first for the Twins has a detrimental effect on a hitter's numbers, look at David Ortiz: playing first for the Twins, even sporadically, hindered his full potential. It is totally not a coincidence or attributable to managerial changes that his slugging percentage jumped 92 points once he signed with Boston.

So basically, hitting like Morneau did in 2006 with such an overwhelming localized position/franchise factor against him is like a player hitting .350/.430/.650 in 1968 or striking out 320 batters in 1919. If he played for the Indians or the Tigers nobody'd be calling his MVP candidacy a farce, because he would have singlehandedly won the Triple Crown.

Batista wuz robbed

/clemenzabait

Bait taken. If you want to argue that Ellsbury or Cabrera was robbed, sure--wouldn't agree, but they both had strong cases. Bautista, much less so, I think, and not primarily because of the Jays' fourth-place finish. The problem was that he did all his hitting in April and May; he was still getting on base the second half (.419), but he hit .257 and slugged .477.

the whole season counts, you know

ie, doing all [sic] your hitting in April and May is not a problem

i think matt kemp got robbed!

yeah, at least the legit #2 guy won tho

I think it is a problem, a big problem, if you do the bulk of your hitting in the first two months, and then go flat after the All-Star break or down the stretch. I just can't reconcile that with the idea that you were your league's most valuable player.

but not if your bulk is in Aug/Sept, I take it.

No, that'd be a plus...Basically, I think it comes down to this: you're looking at this through the prism of something you know to be true--that all wins count equally in the standings (I can't argue that)--and I'm looking at it through the prism of something I strongly believe to be true, that there are many psychological factors involved over the course of a pennant race as to when you do most of your winning. I think it's something that could be easily studied. You chop up the season into three parts--Mar./April/May, June/July, Aug./Sept./Oct.--and come up with some way to see where the highest correlation is between winning games and winning pennants. Maybe there'd prove to be no difference, or maybe one of those parts would clearly have a higher correlation--maybe it'd be the first part, I don't know. But I think you'd have to actually study it.

This is the best post-mortem I read, by somebody who would have voted for Bautista:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/cliff_corcoran/11/21/justin.verlander.al.mvp/index.html

From everything I read afterwards, the writers (non-voters, I guess) seemed perfectly okay with the Verlander pick, and were more bothered by Braun over Kemp.

been done

xp

And? If you know of anything online, please point me to it...

at first I was mad about Braun v. Kemp but I didnt notice that Braun had good steal #s and the main difference between their numbers were 'protection' and defense which nobody gives a shit about.. if the dummies at the bbwaa want to use playoff participation as a tie breaker than so be it, I guess..

wasn't close enough for a "tie"

I won't bother starting a new thread...This is sort of related: a handy guide to the question of "Who's the best player/pitcher in the game?" over the years:

(Player) http://highheatstats.blogspot.com/2011/12/baseball-behemoths-rolling-three-year.html

(Pitcher) http://highheatstats.blogspot.com/2011/12/baseball-behemoths-rolling-three-year_09.html

I'm still interested in that question I posed a few posts back, about whether late-season success disproportionately correlates to winning pennants, and whether that should factor into an MVP vote. So I took a break from wild gossipy horserace politics and sent a "Hey Bill" out today (fourth from the top temporarily, before it disappears behind the firewall):

http://www.billjamesonline.com/hey_bill/

He doesn't really come down one way or the other--a little bit in my direction, but not much.