An Open Letter to Bill Regarding MVP Voting

“Jim Ingraham was the lone voter to leave Verlander off his ballot yesterday, and I think he did it for totally the wrong reason (which will be the point of the rest of this post), but he certainly had the right to do so, and I'm kind of glad someone did.” -Bill, like, two hours ago

Dear Bill,

The Common Man was going to leave this as a comment, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to run long, so a post it shall be…

Seriously, man, TCM does not understand how you can believe that Ingraham has the right to blatantly ignore the voting rules for an organization he belongs to. His post was well certainly thoughtful and his willingness to fully explain himself is completely appreciated on this end, but man is he wrong.

You’re a lawyer; do you get to ignore the rules of evidence simply because you don’t like them? Do you get to call the press and tell them what a scumbag your client because you think attorney-client privilege is bunch of bunk that only protects the guilty? Do you have the right to disrupt a sentencing hearing because you find the death penalty abhorrent?

Of course not. You chose to be a lawyer, and to abide by specific rules in order to be one. Similarly, Jim Ingraham chose to become a sportswriter, and chose to vote in the BBWAA election. It is incumbent upon him, then to follow the rules of that organization. If he doesn’t like the rules, he can lobby the BBWAA to change them. There are a number of writers who would agree with him. But there is no excuse for a writer to impose his own rules on the process, particularly when his decision to do so has the ability to hurt Justin Verlander just like it hurt Pedro Martinez in 2000. It’s selfish, petty, and thoughtless.

How Pitchers Can Be as Valuable as Hitters

By Bill


As you may remember, I don't think pitchers should be eligible for the MVP award. And were I voting today, when the rules explicitly state that they are eligible, I wouldn't vote for one. It's funny to me that there are people who think voters are bound to consider pitchers because the instructions say they're technically eligible, but think voters are free to consider utterly irrelevant things the instructions more or less unambiguously don't leave room for, like whether or not the candidate's team made or contended the playoffs...but that's a discussion for another day.

Jim Ingraham was the lone voter to leave Verlander off his ballot yesterday, and I think he did it for totally the wrong reason (which will be the point of the rest of this post), but he certainly had the right to do so, and I'm kind of glad someone did.

But I've spent some time (more than I should have, certainly) hanging around on MVP-related discussion and comment boards today, and I was shocked by how many casual or non-sabermetrically minded fans were dead-set against Verlander winning, and for what seems to me like a crazily stupid reason, the same reason Ingraham used in the link above. I'll quote from Ingraham, since he's considerably more literate than the dozens of other examples I've seen:

I know Verlander is a great pitcher. I also know, by the nature of his job, he did not appear at all in 128 of the Tigers' games this year. That's 79 percent of the Tigers' season. I can't think of any other sport in which a player who didn't play in 79 percent of his team's games could be voted the Most Valuable Player in his league.

And it just blows me away how relentlessly, determinedly ignorant this position is. And I think most people who get to this blog probably have the same reaction, or at least understand mine. But I was so overwhelmed by the lack of understanding of what I thought was a really straightforward, facially obvious fact -- pitchers can be just as valuable as hitters -- that I thought a more thorough breakdown than what we did in our blogfight was warranted.

Blogfight: Should Pitchers Win the MVP?

By Bill and The Common Man

Blogfight, a gentleman's game. Blog fight, a test of wills.

If you follow Bill and The Common Man on Twitter, you may have noticed that they had a short disagreement a couple weeks back about whether pitchers should be eligible to win the MVP award.  Bill, ever the jackass, wrote that he wanted to cruelly expel them from the process by legal means or simple shunning, stripping them of their basic rights as a baseball player and a human being.  The Common Man benevolently believed that all who played baseball should have a chance to win the award, as befits their God-given human dignity.  Unable to come to an agreement in 140 characters or less, they agreed to pistols at dawn to settle the issue. 

When neither showed up, owing to them both being cowards not wanting to get shot, they decided to settle it via a blogfight.  Each will get an opening statement (which they wrote without reading the other's comments) and then a chance to respond.  Feel free to continue the debate with them, or with each other, in the comments.

Theories of value

By Jason Wojciechowski

To begin

The passing of September 1 in baseball is like hitting Thanksgiving in the real world. Christmas sales, holiday music in the department stores, and making lists for Santa are sanctioned the second we stop stuffing ourselves with turkey while the Lions lose on TV. In baseball, we've been talking about awards all year, tracking who's in the lead both by the stats and the narrative, but come the expansion of rosters, the awards talk gains legitimacy. Starters only have a handful of chances to improve their standing and position players have their last shot at a 20-RBI month that'll impress the 73-year-old beat writer 2000 miles away.

My last post here proposed a new award system, but that's fantasy-land. I'll still be giving you my Willie Mays Award winners come the end of the year, but I know that's not what everyone else will be thinking about. Instead, the real Most Valuable Player trophy is at stake. As ever, then, the baseball commentariat has created a grand foofaraw over the meaning of "valuable." Some think the MVP can only come from a winning team in contention for the playoffs. Others believe that an individual's work must be taken as far out of his team's context as sabermetricians can manage before his "value" can be properly determined. This debate has often broken down on old-school vs. new-school lines, though that's hardly black-and-white -- Andre Dawson won in 1987 for a bad Cubs team long before internet baseball nerds had any sway, and Steve Slowinski recently wrote at Fangraphs that valuing the work of players on contenders more highly than equivalent work on bad teams actually makes sense.

We'd all be a lot better off, I've come to believe, if we weren't quite so quick to jump down each other's throats about what "value" means, pretending that there's only one sensible definition and that it's somehow inherent in the world "value" and instead tightened up our individual understandings of value into something intellectually defensible that does not serve as a mere post-hoc rationale for our favored candidate. This would leave us more time to focus on what our theory of value leads us to in terms of which player deserves the award.

I think we can identify two reasonable definitions of player value for the purpose of awards, as well as two not-crazy definitions that simply aren't workable. None of the following four theories of value are, I believe, subject to attack on the grounds that they have no intellectually honest grounding in language or baseball.

WANTED: New end-of-season award

By Jason Wojciechowski

A few days ago, I wrote a piece at my original home pointing out a bunch of silly things Bill Simmons said in his article about the MVP at Grantland. One portion of his argument that I left alone had to do with whether pitchers should be eligible for the MVP. Can the best pitcher in the league, who starts just 32 games, really be better than the center-fielder who starts 160? Surprisingly (this is Bill Simmons we're talking about), he comes out with the right answer: starting pitchers absolutely can be MVPs. Unsurprisingly (see last parenthetical), there's no actual argument to back this up beyond "Lefty Grove won the first AL MVP and Pedro shoulda won in 1999," but whatever: by any means necessary, right?

Here's the problem, though: once we've come to accept that a pitcher can be the Most Valuable Player in baseball, baseball's award system starts to look really unfair. Why does the Cy Young Award exist? We could declare, even if just de facto, that the MVP is for position players and the Cy Young is for hitters pitchers, but all that does is reinforce the idea that pitchers and hitters aren't comparable. Wouldn't it be more just, not to mention more fun, if there were a hitter equivalent of the Cy Young, and then the winners of the Cy Young and the hitter award did battle for the ultimate MVP award?

The Hank Aaron Award almost covers this gap, but the main stumbling block is that defense apparently does not matter for that prize. This page at MLB.com describes the award as being for "the best overall offensive performer." That doesn't help explain why Derek Jeter has won the trophy twice, but I want my Cy Young equivalent to be a Best Position Player award, not a Best Hitter award, to ensure that defense and position are officially considered relevant by whoever we decide to have vote for the trophy. They matter in real life, after all, so they should definitely matter in award-voting.

Obligatory Mid-Season Awards Post

By Bill


Because not everything has to be groundbreaking or something, dammit. These are just kind of fun.

Here's who I'd vote for for the big awards if the season ended today. I'm flying solo again; TCM and/or Mark can jump in with their own picks if they want to, but I'm just not feeling like a team player.

I'll also throw in who I expect to deserve it by year's end. Not who I think will win, of course -- I've long given up trying to figure that sort of thing out -- but who I think I'd vote for a few months from now.

AL MVP
Today: Jose Bautista (.334/.468/.702, 6.6 fWAR, 6.6 bWAR)
Easiest one first. Bautista leads the majors by a healthy margin in homers, OBP, SLG, and WAR. To get to Bautista's 6.6 fWAR from the AL runners-up's WAR (4.8 by Boston's Adrian Gonzalez and Jacoby Ellsbury), you would have to add in one whole Mark Trumbo or Jeff Francoeur. It's not close.
End of the Season: Bautista. He's too far ahead, and with 7 homers and a .395 batting average in his first ten games of July, he's showing no sign of slowing down.