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.
