The National League MVP Race

With less than a month’s worth of games left remaining in the regular season, the whole of the season is starting to come into focus, and the time for foolishly definitive statements has arrived, statements such as:

-The Cubs are the best team in baseball this year. (I just shuddered while typing that.)
-Cliff Lee is ten times better than your favorite starting pitcher.
-K-Rod is going to be massively overpaid this offseason. Saves!
-Now begins a new era of Yankee futility, in which they do not make the postseason for the next ten years.*

*A guy can dream, can’t he?

And, the single most blindingly obvious conclusion that can be made from the 2008 MLB regular season:

-Albert Pujols is, by far, the most valuable player in baseball this year.

Pujols devours the soul of yet another pitcher.

Now, granted, it doesn’t take much prescience to recognize that Albert Pujols is basically a baseball-hitting alien sent from the deepest recesses of space for the purpose of bringing death and destruction to pitchers worldwide, and that, as such, he would make a great choice for MVP in just about any season he’s played. So, it’s not exactly a stretch to declare him the obvious choice for MVP.The problem is, the writers don’t see it that way. Ever since Barry Bonds ended his ungodly stretch of seasons from 2001 to 2004, Pujols has been the best player in the National League just about every season. The Baseball Writers Association of America was extremely happy to finally be able to crown Pujols with his first MVP award after the 2005 season, and then promptly cast him aside for the next two seasons, during which Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins of the Philadelphia Phillies were able to snatch up one MVP award each, neither of which they deserved over Pujols.

In 2006, Ryan Howard had an outstanding season. He hit .313/.425/.659, good for a 167 OPS+ (second in the NL), he smashed 58 homers in only his first full-time season, and he very nearly took the Phillies to the postseason, though they fell just short of winning the NL Wild Card. The problem is, Pujols was better by just about any standard you can name. He beat Howard in each of the rate stat categories, hitting .331/.431/.671 in a less hitter-friendly park, good for a 178 OPS+. His team won the division (and eventually the World Series), and while Howard is a rather poor fielder at first base, Pujols is a stud, the best fielder at his position in baseball, and probably the best fielding first baseman since the days of Keith Hernandez and Don Mattingly.

Howard had a few things going for him:

A) He represented a new face, and stuff that’s new is always more interesting. Pujols tends to be taken for granted; he’s been around for eight seasons now, he’s been one of the best players in baseball during every single one of those seasons, and for most of that run, the Cardinals were an NL powerhouse. Whoop-de-do, that doesn’t sell papers or capture attentions quite like an emerging All-Star hitting 58 homers does.

B) The Cardinals were seen as a disappointment that year, nearly choking away the NL Central division title and actually winning less games than Howard’s Phillies in the regular season. There’s this weird thing with both the fans and the media where, when a team is disappointing, often the team’s best player will shoulder the blame for that. While I severely doubt that anybody was consciously blaming Pujols for the Cardinals winning “only” 83 games, the team’s performance was probably enough to grant Howard more credit for nearly taking a team that nobody expected much out of to the postseason.

C) The biggest advantage Howard had: He hit more homers (58 to Pujols’ 49) and drove in more runs (149 to Pujols’ 137). While statistical analysis in baseball has become more and more nuanced and intelligent with each passing year, that all flies right out the window when a young guy like Howard (who, I should note, is actually older than Pujols) hammers 58 dingers and drives in just shy of 150 runs in his first full season.

Howard would’ve made a fine selection for MVP in just about any other season, but when there’s a player in the same league who plays the exact same position, and does literally everything better, how can that player not be more valuable?

And then, of course, last year, Jimmy Rollins won the MVP. I won’t even get into that – it was such a stupid, infuriating, obviously wrong decision that to break it down would be to dignify it far more than it deserves. Suffice it to say, not only was Rollins not nearly as valuable as Pujols, there were probably 10 other players in the NL who were more valuable.

This is all symptomatic of a tendency that Bill James once outlined of the MVP voting. True superstars – such as Stan Musial, the player James used to demonstrate this principle – are very often the best player in their leagues for years on end, but they never win the MVP every year. There were probably about ten different years in which Stan Musial – or Willie Mays, or Hank Aaron, or Rogers Hornsby, or Babe Ruth, or whoever you want to use as your example – were the best players in their league, and yet, nobody other than Barry Bonds has ever won more than three MVP awards. Let’s face it, the writers don’t want to give it to the same player every year, no matter how deserving he is, because that would be boring, and if there’s one thing media can’t afford to be, it’s boring.

There’s also the idea that true superstars, even in their down years, are often still the most valuable players in their leagues. Pujols’ numbers last year, for example, represented the second-lowest OPS, OPS+ and slugging percentage of his entire career. He hit “only” 32 homers, a far cry from the 49 he had hit just one year previous. And yet, he was still probably the most valuable player in the National League that year. But since his numbers were down, his season looked like a disappointment in comparison, which draws away some of the luster of voting for him.

There is no such problem with Pujols’ numbers this year. El Hombre is leading the Major Leagues in what I like to refer to as the Rate Stat Triple Crown: batting average (.360), on-base percentage (.468), and slugging percentage (.640). He leads the latter two categories by fairly significant margins (12 and 38 points over his next-best competitors). He is, again, having an outstanding season in the field, and he is just about the only reason that the Cardinals are even in sniffing distance of the National League Wild Card, instead of duking it out with the Pirates and the Reds in the basement of the NL Central.

Unfortunately, there are still some large obstacles in his way: the Cardinals are not likely going to make the postseason this year, Pujols’ “traditional” numbers (homers and RBIs) are not eye-popping, and, of course, voting for him would probably be “boring” to the writers, who would rather select a new player, such as Hanley Ramirez, for the award.

If the writers have any sense at all, they will recognize that Pujols has been, by a significant margin, the single most valuable player in baseball this season, and will not deny him of a well-deserved MVP award once again. If Pujols doesn’t win this year, it will be, in the words of Bart Simpson, “the greatest injustice in the history of the world!” If they have enough sense to vote for him, it won’t be a race. It will be a unanimous selection.