Revisiting the AL MVP Race

A couple of weeks ago, at the height of the Twitter AL MVP froo-frah, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post arguing that Victor Martinez should win AL MVP and Rafael Betancourt should win NL MVP, since both players had achieved great success (albeit in absurdly limited playing time) while toiling for the two teams with the slimmest leads in their respective playoff races.

This was meant to tweak the idea that to win a Most Valuable Player award, a player should be the deciding factor in his team making the playoffs. Of course there’s absolutely nothing in the rules stipulating that an MVP must come from a playoff team, a contending team, or even a team that finishes above .500. It’s just an interpretation voters have decided to take upon themselves over the years. What’s funny is that on the rare occasions when voters have bucked that convention, presumably to pick the most deserving candidate, they’ve often failed miserably. When Andre Dawson won NL MVP in 1987, the pick was a joke, but not because the Cubs finished last that year. It was because despite the flashy HR (49) and RBI (137) totals, Dawson was less valuable than several other players, including Tony Gwynn, Eric Davis and Dale Murphy.

Granted, Dawson’s off-field story — where MLB owners colluded against him to the point where he showed up at Cubs spring training, told the team to fill in any contract amount they wanted and he’d sign — was both dramatic and damning to the game’s establishment. But Dawson wasn’t even the best player who’d been colluded against that off-season. Tim Raines’ performance in ’87 was even better than Dawson’s, and that’s after Raines was forced to miss the entire month of April due to a weird roster rule which only made collusion more galling and painful.

Anyway, back to ’09. Snarky Betancourting aside, Joe Mauer was my pick at the time for AL MVP. Advanced stats were in his favor, with measures such as Wins Above Replacement and Value Over Replacement Player arguing for his candidacy. Traditionalists had to love his flirting with a .400 average. Fans of history appreciated that Mauer was on pace for the best offensive season by a catcher in major league history. Though he’s cooled off a bit since then, Mauer’s line of .367/.435/.608 (through Sunday) is so preposterously good for a catcher that you could forgive the four weeks the Sideburned Splinter spent on the DL. If Rock Raines could be a worthy MVP pick 22 years earlier while missing all of April, why couldn’t Mauer be the same now?

The day after that initial AL MVP post, I covered the NL race. This time, in a not-at-all cheeky pick, I tapped Tim Lincecum as the choice, at least if the season were to have ended in mid-August. Albert Pujols was, and still is, a stone-cold lock in the real world. He’s putting up huge numbers and has been a big reason for the Cardinals’ success this season (though trade acquisition Matt Holliday gets a Geno Malkin-sized assist in Pujols’ turn as the Cardinals’ Kid Crosby). Since I only care about merit (who should win MVP) and not others’ preferences (who will win MVP), though, I still went with Lincecum. At the time, Timmy led Pujols in WAR by 1 full win. Since then, Chase Utley has leapt ahead of Pujols to move into second place in WAR. Still, the leader in that category remains Tiny Tim. As great as Pujols and Utley (an elite defender at a premium position who’s also a deadly hitter who plays on a soon-to-be playoff team) have been, and as much as one stat isn’t necessarily enough to decide a race, Lincecum still makes a great case — at the very least a highly defensible one.

Fast forward to the current AL MVP race. Like Pujols in the NL, Mauer has been passed in the WAR standings, in this case the biggest surprise player of 2009, Ben Zobrist. I still see Mauer as more valuable, though. For one thing, Mauer’s getting disproportionately dinged for his early injury, and by season’s end he could have five months worth of greatness under his belt, enough to tilt the scales back in his favor. Dave Cameron of FanGraphs, USSMariner and Wall Street Journal fame pointed to another factor working in Mauer’s favor: Many advanced statistical measures weight a player’s value against a hypothetical replacement-level body, an ethereal, never-retiring Neifi Perez. But as Cameron explained about Mauer:

His WAR understates his actual value since we don’t try to measure catcher defense, plus I believe there’s additional value in near equal wins being allocated in smaller playing time increments, since that gives a smart/deep organization a chance to replace the lost playing time with better-than-replacement-level guys, so the total production from the position for the team over the whole season will be higher.

One could debate whether Cameron’s point about smart/deep organizations needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, or if we should use it as a blanket statement to cover all teams and illustrate the unlikelihood of most teams truly opting for a Neifi clone in the starting lineup in lieu of an injured starter. If this is meant to be a case-by-case condition, you could debate whether or not the Twins are a smart/deep organization. Few teams have done a better job of scouting and player development than the Twins have in the past decade. On the other hand, the team seems to find a way to hand ungodly amounts of playing time to players at or even below replacement level, year after year. You have to wonder if Mauer and Justin Morneau might’ve sipped a lot more postseason champagne if not for Minnesota’s flings with such albatrosses as Sidney Ponson and non-fluke year Nick Punto in recent years. At any rate, I buy Cameron’s point here, and agree that I’d rather have an all-world player in my lineup for 135 games and a half-decent replacement in his stead for the other 27 contests, instead of having a merely very good player clocking 155-160 starts.

Now that I’ve spent 1,000 words burying the lead, I’m going to argue that:

…Even with Mauer having a historic season for a catcher

…Even though I don’t care about a team’s place in the standings (the Twins aren’t going anywhere)

…Even though catcher defense is so tough to quantify that FanGraphs doesn’t do it, while Mauer might in fact be one of the top defensive catchers in the game (studies such as Tom Tango’s Fans’ Scouting Report have argued that Mauer’s a good defender)

…Even with an upward adjustment in Mauer’s value, stemming from the not-really-replacement-level theory of replacement players

…I’d still pick Zack Greinke instead.

Rany Jazayerli and Minda Haas are among the writers arguing that Greinke should be a slam dunk pick for AL Cy Young. But just as there’s nothing in the voting standards that says a player need play for a winning team to be an MVP candidate, there’s also no restriction on a pitcher being MVP. Writers have again simply decided to make their own rules, where a pitcher can only be selected for MVP honors if he goes 35-0 and turns water into Anchor Steam (I would be in favor of such powers, by the way).

Like Lincecum, Greinke leads his league in Wins Above Replacement (both pitchers are at 7.5). Like Lincecum a couple weeks ago, Greinke ranks 1 full win above his closest competitor.

Do you prefer more widely used stats? Greinke also, as Joe Posnanski Tweeted today, leads the AL in:

ERA
ERA+
shutouts
complete games
WHIP
HRs/9

Greinke ranks second in:

Strikeouts
K/BB

There is one strike against Greinke which makes me a little reluctant to pick him over Mauer, and it’s not that Greinke probably won’t win 20 games. It’s this:

Greinke’s made 27 starts this season — with zero starts against the Red Sox and Yankees. The Red Sox aren’t the offensive juggernaut they’ve been in the recent past, but they are dangerous. The Yankees, of course, are offensive beasts, playing in a home park that makes them even more daunting, and an even bigger challenge for any pitcher.

The unbalanced schedule is going to create this kind of wrinkle every year. Last season Cliff Lee sported slightly better numbers than Roy Halladay, going by many traditional stats, as well as those advanced metrics that don’t account for quality of competition. Considering Halladay had to face AL East foes most often, while Lee squared off most frequently against AL Central opponents, choosing between the two pitchers was tough. In facing AL Central opponents most often, Greinke gets that same advantage.

With that said, it’s worth remembering that Mauer also gets the benefit of playing in a lesser division, not having to face some of the tough pitching staffs of the AL East quite as often (although Justin Verlander, Edwin Jackson, Mark Buehrle, and yes, Zack Greinke all hail from the Central).

Ultimately, the race for AL MVP should come down to the final month. Mauer can make up some serious ground as his April absence fades further into the rear view mirror (his numbers went up further with his 26th homer tonight). Meanwhile, the Royals do face the Yankees and Red Sox, as well as the hard-hitting Angels, in September. So we really will have to wait and see.

But gun to my head, right here and now? Greinke’s the pick. And I’ll leave you with one tie-breaking factor in his favor:

Only the Seattle Mariners have scored fewer runs among AL teams this season than the Kansas City Royals’ 4.08 per game. Adjust for park effects and the Royals grade out as the worst offensive team in the league. Adjust further for league effects (NL teams score fewer runs as a whole, largely due to the no-DH rule), and the Royals come out as the single worst offensive team in all of baseball.

Yes, Zack Greinke never gets to experience the wide-eyed joy that comes with facing such luminaries as Yuniesky Betancourt, Willie Bloomquist and Mike Jacobs.

(Tiny) Advantage: Greinke