Confession time: I’ve only been a baseball fan since 2004. It all started for me on July 19th, 2004, when the Cardinals visited Wrigley Field for a brief two-game series, which, due to a quirk in the scheduling, would actually be the last games between the teams for the rest of the season. I had just moved from St. Louis to Olathe, Kansas, having just finished 8th grade, so I had nothing to do for the rest of the summer, kind of like Scotty Smalls in The Sandlot. I basically spent all day watching TV, browsing the internet and generally contributing nothing to society.

I was browsing channels in the kitchen while eating dinner that night, and stumbled across the Cards-Cubs game on WGN. Now, I never hated baseball or anything, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I figured I’d watch – if anything, it helped me feel less homesick to watch a St. Louis sports team a few hundred miles away. Fortunately, I picked a hell of a game to watch – a game that would eventually become known to Cardinals fans as “The Zambrano Game.” Jim Edmonds took Big Z deep, and Zambrano shouted and raved at Edmonds as he rounded the bases. A couple of innings later, after Rolen sent another of his pitches into the outfield stands, Zambrano plunked Edmonds and was ejected. Not legendary drama on the level of the Pine-Tar Game, but still pretty entertaining stuff. I made up my mind to make sure to catch tomorrow’s game as well.

Long story short, Matt Morris got shelled, the Cardinals were deep in the hole, and Albert Pujols more or less single-handedly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, going 5-for-5 with three homers and a double. His last homer gave the Cardinals the lead for good. From then on, I was hooked. I convinced my dad to purchase MLB Extra Innings later that week, and I’ve been locked in ever since.

I’ve been fortunate to watch some pretty great Cardinal teams over the past few years, but obviously, I’ve missed a whole hell of a lot of baseball. One thing I love about baseball is its sense of history, and I love to spend hours at a time reading up on the players of years past from whatever source I can get it – ESPN Classic articles, Bill James’ New Historical Baseball Abstract, discussions on BaseballThinkFactory, whatever. But nothing is a replacement for actually getting to see the guys play. So, without further rambling, I present my All-Time “Players I Wish I Had Seen” Team.

Catcher: Josh Gibson

Pretty much the consensus choice for the greatest catcher in baseball history, everybody knows that Josh Gibson was denied his chance to play in the Major Leagues due to segregation and instead became the greatest star in all the Negro Leagues. However, the fact that he didn’t play in the Majors may actually have helped his fame, in a way – he would be more of a household name if he had been a Major Leaguer, but the stories about him wouldn’t be nearly as colorful, like the anecdote about hitting a baseball out of Yankee Stadium (something nobody has ever accomplished, not even Mickey Mantle, who hit baseballs almost as hard as he hit the sauce), or the story about him hitting a ball so far and high into the night sky that it fell back into the field the next day.

Gibson was a stocky, powerfully-built man, with thick arms and legs and broad shoulders. It’s not a stretch to speculate that he may very well have hit baseballs as hard, as fast and as far as anyone in the game’s history. His life was tragic – besides the forced segregation of his baseball-playing career, his wife died while in labor, and Gibson himself was to die of a brain tumor aged only 35 – but he made the most of it.

First Base: Ted Kluszewski

I imagine that most of you right now are wondering, “Who in the hell is Ted Kluszewski?” I didn’t know myself until just a couple of years ago, when I was compiling a list of players who had hit 40 or more homers in a season while homering more often than they struck out. It was a list populated with some legendary names: Rogers Hornsby, Joe DiMaggio, those types of guys. Right in the middle of this list, I came across Ted Kluszewski, who had three such seasons in a row in the 1950s: 40-49-47 in homers from 1953-1955, with corresponding totals of 34-35-40 strikeouts.

Needless to say, I was impressed. I’ve never managed to dig up much information on Kluszewski otherwise, but the stat line has me intrigued enough on its own. Baseball Reference lists Kluszewski as 6′2, 225 – big, but not Frank Howard massive. So basically, you’ve got a pretty big guy who hits the ball hard a lot and puts the bat on the ball just about every time he’s at the plate. Those types of players are pretty fun to watch.

Second Base: Joe Morgan

Before he became an incompetent ESPN baseball “analyst” and color commentator, Joe Morgan was primarily known for being really freaking awesome as a player, winning two MVP awards in the 1970s, being named by Bill James as the greatest second baseman in the history of baseball, and so on. There’s nothing he didn’t do well – he hit for decent averages, he walked a ton, he rarely grounded into double plays, he had a pretty good amount of power, he stole tons of bases, and was a solid fielder. There’s really not a lot to say about Joe Morgan – he was just awesome, and I like awesome stuff, and wish I could’ve witnessed him awesome-ing it up.

Awesome.

Third Base: Wade Boggs

I’m probably starting to make you guys feel really old right now. Wade Boggs? The dude just retired in 1999. Well, like I said, I didn’t start watching baseball until five years after that. And besides, I’m referring to 1980s Wade Boggs, the Wade Boggs that opened his career by batting .349 in 104 games and then proceeded to win five batting titles in the next six years, as well as leading the AL in on-base percentage in six of the next seven by merit of walking 90 to 100 times each year.

Wade Boggs wasn’t a good baserunner – in fact, he was clumsy and slow and poor, and probably cost the Red Sox some runs due to this. He was considered a decent, if indifferent fielder. He didn’t have much power – a career slugging percentage of .443, and only one season with more than 11 homers (that aberrant 1987 season where he randomly hit 24 homers and proceeded to hit no more than 8 in a season until 1994). But, my god, he could hit the baseball around the field. And he did have nearly 600 doubles, so it’s not like he was the original Ichiro or anything.

Plus, he once downed like 200 beers on a flight or something, which earns him a spot in my All-Time Awesome Guys Hall of Fame, which will be a separate post in the future.

Shortstop: Ozzie Smith

Yeah, since I only started watching baseball four years ago, I never saw The Wizard of Ahs*, at least not beyond a few hazy memories of him in the twilight of his career. I would’ve loved to be able to see him in the 1980s, where he managed to be a legitimate MVP candidate in spite of OPS+ numbers of less than 100, due to the fact that, by popular and critical acclaim, Ozzie Smith is the single greatest defensive player in baseball history.

Everybody knows that, of course, so I’m just going to go off on a tangent here and make the point that Ozzie Smith was a much better offensive player than most people remember or are willing to give him credit for. His career OPS+ was a rather pedestrian 82, but that comes with several caveats:

A) Before the age of 29, Ozzie’s OPS+ was 72. Afterwards, it was 95. So, he went from pathetic to slightly below the average offensive player.
B) Ozzie’s OPS+ in his prime years was very OBP-heavy, and as a result, OPS+ underrates his offensive contributions by weighting slugging percentage the same. Hilariously, Ozzie’s career OBP of .337 is actually higher than his career slugging percentage of .328. That’s a poor slugging percentage by any standard, but remember than in the 1980s, it wasn’t uncommon for the league slugging percentage to be less than .400.
C) Ozzie was one of the greatest basestealers of all-time, swiping 580 bags while being caught only 148 times, good for a 79% success rate, significantly above the typical “break-even” point of 75%. And the break even point was lower than that for most of Ozzie’s career, due to the lower offensive environment in which he played.
D) While the 1980s were the beginning of the end for no-hit, good-field shortstops, with the arrivals of players like Cal Ripken Jr., Alan Trammell and Barry Larkin, they were still the exception to the rule, and teams regularly ran players like Andres Thomas, Angel Salazar, and Rafael Santana out onto the field. Granted, those are just about the worst of a bad bunch, but the 1980s were not the golden age of shortstops that the current era of baseball is. As a result, Ozzie wasn’t just in his prime an average to slightly above average offensive player, he was a WELL above-average shortstop, even as a hitter.

*Most people refer to Ozzie as “The Wizard of Oz,” a nice pun on his name and on the classic 1939 movie, but I’ve actually read before from some older baseball fans that his nickname was originally “The Wizard of Ahs,” referring to the “oohs” and “ahhs” that his fantastic play at shortstop elicited. I prefer the latter, myself.

Left Field: Stan Musial

If there’s a red-blooded Cardinal fan that wouldn’t choose Stan Musial as their left-fielder, I have yet to meet him or her. I could write forever about Musial, but I couldn’t do a better job of it than Joe Posnanski did in his essay a couple of months ago, so I won’t try. If you were making a list of the greatest baseball players of all time, Musial would be a shoo-in for the top 15, and would make the top 10 on most lists. If you made a list of the nicest baseball players of all-time, he might be #1.

Stan Musial is probably the most underrated top-fifteen player in the history of baseball. Everybody who really knows baseball knows Stan Musial, but he’s not a household name like Mays, Cobb, Ruth, Gehrig, and others, while he certainly should be.

I’ll close this by quoting my favorite excerpt from Poz’s essay:

“To me, the best description of Musial through his stats is to say that 16 times in his career Musial hit 30 or more doubles. It might not make for a great movie. But it tells you that all his baseball life, Stan Musial hit baseballs into gaps and he ran hard out of the box.”

Center Field: Mickey Mantle

Mickey Mantle. The man, the myth, the legend. Quite arguably the most talented baseball player that ever put on a uniform, capable of hitting 500-foot homers while drunk and/or hungover, with the speed of a gazelle and an unmatched eye for hitting. Not quite the greatest centerfielder of all-time, but he’d finish no lower than 4th on any respectable poll, in a class with Mays, Cobb, and Tris Speaker, and well above his once-teammate Joe DiMaggio, who, quite frankly, couldn’t hold The Mick’s jockstrap.

Mickey Mantle was so good for so long it defies explanation. He finished first in the AL in OPS+ an amazing nine times. His career OPS+ was 172, better than Albert Pujols’ current career OPS+ of 170, and not only has Pujols not started his decline phase, the Mick was a centerfielder – AP is a first baseman. Wow.

In 1956 and 1957, Mantle put up back-to-back seasons as good as any two-season stretch by just about any other player in baseball history:

1956: .353/.464/.705, 210 OPS+, Triple Crown
1957: .365/.512/.665, 223 OPS+

Those seasons would make a first baseman the obvious choice for MVP. A centerfielder who puts up those numbers is nothing short of a God. To think that Mantle did this while suffering from the effects of osteomyelitis, as well as ravaging his body through his own party-hard lifestyle, only makes you wonder, could he possibly have been even better?

For as incredible as he was, Mantle was a tragic, even pathetic, figure in ways. But it was his flaws that made him so endearing and so beloved. I’ve read stories of grown men who wept for Mantle’s death, who were transformed back into their 14-year-old selves when they finally got the chance to meet their boyhood idol. Mantle came to lament his past in the later years of his life, and it’s hard not to feel a bit of sadness when you hear quotes like, “If I’d known I was going to live so long I’d have taken better care of myself.” Bob Costas put it wonderfully when he eulogized Mantle:

“In the last year, Mickey Mantle, always so hard on himself, finally came to accept and appreciate the distinction between a role model and a hero. The first he often was not, the second he always will be. And, in the end, people got it.”

Right Field: Hank Aaron

Hank Aaron, until very recently, was Major League Baseball’s all-time home run leader, but I still wonder if he gets the respect he deserves. Nobody fails to recognize that he’s one of the all-time greats, but the names of Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, et al, seem to have taken on a more mythic status – and while Hank is no Babe, you could make a strong argument that Hammerin’ Hank was every bit as good as the Say Hey Kid. Hard to believe, maybe, but a look at the numbers bears it out. They were virtually identical hitters:

Aaron: .305/.374/.555, 155 OPS+, 76% stolen base rate
Mays: .302/.384/.557, 156 OPS+, 76% stolen base rate

Mays has a clear defensive advantage, but Aaron makes up most if not all of that ground due to his extra 1,447 career plate appearances – an extra two-and-a-half seasons of the same quality of hitting. If push came to shove, I’d probably pick Mays over Aaron, but the argument for Mays isn’t as decisive as you might suspect.

Mentally, I’ve always had an image of Aaron as the original Vlad Guerrero – high average hitter who walked a bit but was never near the league leaders in that category, lots of power, and the ability to hit bad balls out of the park with authority. (I have no way to know if that last part is true of Aaron, so feel free to correct me.) Both were right fielders as well; Aaron has a fine reputation as a fielder, and though Guerrero isn’t the greatest fielder, he’s certainly garnered plenty of attention for his arm, which is one of the strongest in the league, even if his accuracy occasionally leaves something to be desired.

All-in-all, Hank Aaron was easily one of the greatest players in MLB history (well, duh), but for whatever reason, his name isn’t spoken with the same hushed reverence as the likes of Mays, Ruth, Cobb, and others. It certainly should be.

Starting Pitcher: Sandy Koufax

I made the choice for starting pitcher a lot more difficult than it otherwise might have been by limiting myself to one, instead of an entire starting rotation. It was hard to narrow down the list – some of the names that just missed the cut include Gibson, Seaver, Feller, Walter Johnson, and Steve Carlton – but when it comes down to it, I don’t think there’s any pitcher more popular or revered than Sandy Koufax, or one with as much intrigue. He’s one of baseball’s romantic heroes – a legendary player who was, in his own time, the most popular player in either league, more popular, even, than Mays and Mantle and Williams, who threw four no-hitters including one perfect game, who held the single-season strikeout record until Nolan Ryan broke it, and who had a sub-1.00 ERA in the World Series, baseball’s biggest stage.

To me, the defining moment in Koufax’s career is his Game 1 start in the 1963 World Series, against the New York Yankees, 104-win juggernaut who finished second in the American League in runs scored and featured Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra. Koufax went the distance while striking out 15 batters and allowing only two runs. Koufax struck out the first five batters he faced, and of the first 14 batters he faced, only one even managed to get the ball into the infield. Here’s how those batters went down:

Strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, foul popout, strikeout, groundout, foul popout, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, strikeout, foul popout.

10 strikeouts, three foul popouts, and one groundout by Clete Boyer. Utter domination.

Pitching has always been my favorite part of baseball ever since I became a fan. To me, the aesthetic beauty of a good pitch is unmatched by any aspect of any other sport; I’ve always loved to watch pitchers with big, knee-buckling curves in particular. And very few, if any, pitchers have ever had knee-buckling curves as renowned as Sandy Koufax.

Relief Pitcher: Hoyt Wilhelm

Mariano Rivera may be nearly a household name, but Hoyt Wilhelm is still the all-time greatest relief pitcher. He was so good for so long, starting his career at the late age of 29 and still managing to squeeze out a 21-year-long career, throwing 2,254.3 innings with a stellar 146 ERA+, including a 155 ERA+ -after the age of 40! Wilhelm was such a good pitcher that in 1959, when the Orioles gave him nearly a full year’s worth of starts, he pitched 226 innings, posted a 2.19 ERA (173 ERA+), and, had the award yet existed, would’ve been a shoo-in for the Cy Young.

The key to Wilhelm’s longevity, in addition to his quality, was that he was a knuckleballer. Knuckleballers, due to the low-velocity pitches they throw, put much less stress on their arms than the Pedro Martinezes and AJ Burnetts of the world. So, a pitcher of the quality of Hoyt Wilhelm, starting at the late age of 29, throwing low velocity pitches for his entire career – it’s actually not too surprising that he pitched all the way up to the age of 49.

So, there you have it – my (extremely long) personal list of the players at each position I most wish I had been fortunate enough to see play. It’s a shame video archiving wasn’t implemented for such a long time, and that such archives usually aren’t released for public consumption. I’d pay a lot of money for extended highlights of the careers of any of the players above, and tons of others as well. Hopefully, I have enough baseball watching ahead of me that someday I’ll be able to tell younger generations about the great players they weren’t fortunate enough to see. And laugh at their misfortune.

Notable events that have occurred on the date of August 4th throughout history:

-1892: Lizzie Borden’s family found murdered
-1914: Germany invades Belgium, the UK declares war on Germany.
-1944: Anne Frank and family discovered by Gestapo.
-1993: Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell sentenced to 30 months in prison for Rodney King beating.

And, last but not least:

-2005: Felix Hernandez makes his MLB debut against the Detroit Tigers, pitching five innings, with four strikeouts, two walks, three hits, two runs (one earned), and earns a loss in the first decision of his career.

August 2005, a more innocent time, when Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” was topping the charts, President Bush was endorsing intelligent design, Peter Jennings was just about to pass away, and the Seattle Mariners were…well, just as crappy as they are this year, actually, fourth in the AL West division. But the light at the end of the tunnel for that miserable Mariner season was Felix Hernandez, their 19-year-old phenom pitching prospect. King Felix, as he is popularly known, had been drawing raves for his potential for several years to that point. He was said to throw a high-90s fastball, a knee-buckling curve, a decent change-up, and a slider so devastating that it drew raves even without anybody ever having seen him throw it. (Allegedly, the Mariners disallowed use of the pitch, for fear it would irreparably damage his young arm.)

If not the best pitching prospect ever (that title would probably go to Dwight Gooden), Felix was certainly in a group with Kerry Wood, Josh Beckett, Mark Prior and Rick Ankiel as one of the most talented and promising young hurlers of the past decade. He did nothing to belie the massive expectations on his young shoulders by posting a sub-1 WHIP in his 84.3 innings that year, striking out 77 batters and displaying a repertoire not seen since the likes of Pedro Martinez in his prime.

With that first half-season under his belt, everybody expected big things from Felix in 2006, and…well, he was pretty much an average pitcher (which, for a 20 year old, is still rather impressive). He pitched 191 innings in his 31 starts (and could’ve pitched more, though the Mariners wisely placed a strict innings cap on Felix in order to prevent injury or overuse), posted a 176-to-60 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and allowed 23 homers. His ERA was just slightly below league average (a 98 ERA+, which is actually average for a starting pitcher). His WHIP was a mundane 1.34. Well, not everybody can do what Dwight Gooden did when he was 20 (win a Cy Young Award unanimously, lead the league in strikeouts, win 24 games, post a 1.53 ERA, etc.), so there was no reaFeson to be down on Felix – most pitchers aren’t even in AA at that age. (The minor league, not the alcoholic rehab organization.)

The next year, Felix started things off with a bang, striking out 12 Oakland A’s in 8 innings of work, and the buzz started to grow again. This was going to be the year that Felix finally broke out and went all Bob Gibson/Greg Maddux/Pedro on the league, putting up a sub-2 ERA and striking out batters as casually as Randy Johnson against minor league batters.

In his next start, on national TV by way of ESPN, Felix threw a one-hitter against the Red Sox in Fenway Park, striking out six batters and generally making the Sox lineup look stupid. I remember watching that game live, and laughing and gasping and how good Felix’s stuff was. There were several pitches that I was simply in awe at, not just that a 20-year old was throwing them, but that such movement on a baseball was even physically possible. 92-MPH two-seam fastballs that broke six inches right, curves in the low-80s that dropped over a foot, 98-MPH four-seamers exploding into the top of the strike zone…it was like watching Roger Clemens throw a Wiffle ball.

Felix throws a pitch during his one-hit shutout of the Red Sox.

What did his season turn out like? Pretty much just like the season before it. His 110 ERA+ represented a jump forward, but his other numbers were more or less the same: a 1.38 WHIP, 190.3 innings pitched, 165 strikeouts to 53 walks, 20 homers allowed. Bummer, but again, he was still a mere 21 years old, and though his numbers weren’t starkly different, they were a slight bit better.

With the 2008 season just about over, here’s what Felix’s numbers look like so far: 175.3 innings, 130 ERA+, 157 strikeouts to 68 walks, 15 homers, 1.33 WHIP. Again, not a whole lot different from the previous two seasons. What’s the deal?

His strikeout and walk numbers haven’t been much different on a season-by-season basis, though they haven’t improved, which you’d expect from a pitcher with stuff as good as Felix as he learns to pitch more effectively. He’s been cutting his homers down, which is very nice, and is the most obvious reason that his ERA+ has gone from average to above-average to well above-average this season.

Last season, David Cameron over on the excellent USS Mariner wrote an open letter to the Mariners pitching coach, observing that Felix was doing a rather poor job of mixing his pitches up, and as a result, hitters were able to see what was coming and tee off. A few weeks later, Felix cryptically referred to “the internet” noticing that he wasn’t mixing his pitches well, and that he had tried to mix in all his pitches earlier as a result. It would provide a nice explanation as to why a pitcher with such nasty stuff isn’t yet the superstar you’d expect – he is, after all, only 22 years old, and still learning to pitch with each passing year. With as young as he is, the Mariners have also been wise to limit his pitches, and Felix may be limited by his inability to go all out on hitters, since he is facing rather strict pitch count and inning caps and must conserve energy in order to pitch for as long into each start as possible.

Still, you have to wonder, when will he finally put it all together? Tim Lincecum over in the NL, in just his second season, is leading MLB in strikeouts and looks to be the favorite for the Cy Young Award. Chad Billingsley is second in the NL behind Lincecum in strikeouts and has a better ERA and ERA+ than Felix as well. While both of these pitchers are supremely talented, neither has the stuff or the accumulated major league experience of Felix (though they do have an age advantage).

Different players mature at different rates – not every primo prospect is going to storm out of the gates, gun blazing. It would be wise to give Felix more time – after all, his ERA has improved every single year, and he’s still only 22 years old. Greg Maddux didn’t go nuts on the NL until he was 26 years old. Pedro, 25. Hell, it took RJ until he was nearly 30! I imagine it won’t be too many more years until Felix is regularly campaigning for the Cy Young Award. I look forward to it.

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.

I have what I consider to be a semi-significant amount of writing talent, and practically no outlet for it, which is what spurned me to create this blog. That’s pretty much the long and short of it, so if you get some entertainment out of my posts, that’s great, and otherwise, I hope I haven’t wasted too much of your time.