Initially, this was going to be about Stan Musial. Through the age of 27, Musial had won three MVP awards in five seasons (ignoring the one he missed while at war) and added a fourth-place finish. He'd never win another, but he would go on to finish in the top ten of the voting for the next nine consecutive years, including second-place finishes from 1949 through 1951 and in 1957. In many of those years (see Jim Konstanty in 1950 and Hank Sauer in 1952, for instance) the actual winner of the MVP Award was substantially less deserving than Stan the Man was. I approached this thinking that maybe the voters just got tired of giving Musial the award -- as they seem to have done much later with Barry Bonds, robbed several times from 1995-2000 -- and that perhaps one could argue that Stan really should've ended up with seven or eight awards.
One can't, though, or at least I can't. It's not that he wasn't better than the majority of MVP winners from 1949 through 1957; he certainly was. And there's a beloved legend who was deprived of multiple MVP awards during those years; it just wasn't Musial. Jackie Robinson, by and large, was even better.
