Love him or hate him (and you know how the press loves to hate him), Mr. Bonds has just collected his SIXTH MVP award.
Go ahead and rag on his prima donna behavior, if you must. But you have to admit he’s one of the greatest players ever.
Congrats. Now get us the World Series ring, damn it.
I’m surprised he won; my $5 was on Albert Pujols.
But he was a good choice; he had a terrific, terrific year, and helped his team win a hundred games. Certainly the NL voters seem to have a much clearer and more consistent definition for their choices; AL voters appear to vote almost totally at random (Shannon Freakin’ Stewart?? Three 1st Place Votes? WHAT???)
Well and dandy, but we want the Ring.
I have questioned elsewhere whether others should win, but he’s not undeserving.
As you proably know I am an Angels fan. Yes we enjoyed our win in 2002, Bwahaha. To all of you Giants fans I will just say–Rally Monkey. (Sorry, it is like shooting fish in a barrel :))
I am not a fan of Barry Bonds, but the way other clubs fear him and thus adjust their pitching to him makes him an obvious choice. Plus he obviously helps the Giants win. A case can be made about his defensive abilities not being great now but I don’t see it hurting his club that much over the season.
What I think is a more interesting debate is how close the AL MVP voting was. I think it shows that the winning AL teams were just that, teams, with no one player dominating.
This leads to the debate of whether the AL or NL is the better league. Is the NL the better league right now because they have players that are obviously dominate or is the AL the better league because there is no dominate player?
RickJay:
Because it was he who propelled the Twins to the division title. Before they acquired him, the Twins were languishing in third place; he lit a fire under them.
Take it from a Royals fan…it’s not that hard to figure out. I wouldn’t say he deserved to win the prize, but certainly he deserved the consideration he got.
As for Bonds…definitely one of the greatest ever. Easily better than Aaron, probably better than Mays, just a shade below Ted Williams, I’d say. A well-deserved MVP award.
Of course, until some great hitter decides to try his hand at pitching, Babe Ruth will always rank as the # 1 baseball player of all time.
I forgot to include in the above post an idiotic reason I heard this morn about why Bonds should win and not Pujols. It was Rob Dibble on the ESPN radio who said that Bonds should win since he is older and won’t be playing much longer while Pujols will be playing for many more years and based upon his previous performance will be deserving of the honor in years to come. Psaw, Mr. Dibble, that is not a good reason for Bonds to win over Pujols.
cmkeller wrote:
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Before they acquired him, the Twins were languishing in third place; he lit a fire under them.
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Look at the stats–the Twins offense barely changed after Stewart arrived, but their pitching did greatly. (Cite.) Unless you have some sort of theory as to how Stewart’s presence improved their pitching staff, his presence was negligible.
deb2world, you should know by now that Dibble has no brain. Seriously. He had a brainectomy while a reliever, and he’s never looked back.
Stewart certainly helped the Twins, but that’s not at question. What’s absurd is claiming he was THE MOST VALUABLE PLAYER IN THE LEAGUE. There is just no rational basis for saying that. He was quite obviously not even the most valuable player on his team. I’d say that the Twins’ turnaround had far more to do with Brad Radke (9-1 after the break) or Johan Santana (8-1 after the break) than Stewart. The Twins won because their PITCHING improved after the All-Star break.
Put it this way; Stewart basically had a really hot streak in his first 14 games for Minnesota. He hit very well indeed, batting .429 and scoring 12 runs in 14 games. You know what Minnesota’s record was in those 14 games? 9-5. I mean, whoop-dee-do. If they’d gone 13-1 maybe, but 9-5, so what?
After that he was just average; .298 with 5 homers in August, .289 with no homers in September and October, only 3 steals the whole two months and he’s not a good defensive player. You’re giving the guy an MVP Award based on… two weeks? Come on, that’s asinine.
I get irritated because I’m an AL fan and the AL voters seem to be obsessed by silly little Jayson Stark arguments every year. Oooh, someone suggested an off-the-wall candidate, let’s vote for him! The AL voters inexplicably blow it every year. Tejada was a terrible choice, Ichiro was a bad choice, I-Rod was the wrong choice, and they gave two MVPs to frigging Juan Gonzalez? What the hell?
Yet the NL voters pick a reasonable, logical choice almost every year.
Silly little Jayson Stark arguments? That seems a little… condescending.
I don’t think your opinion is very humble, RickJay.
Because it’s so difficult to pick the guy with an OBP over .500 and slugs over .700 for the last three years.
Oh, RickJay’s opinion isn’t humble, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s right. 
Anyone who leads the league in on-base and slugging by roughly seventy points each gets my vote. Three seasons since 1957 has someone posted an on-base percentage greater than .500, and Bonds has all three. I remember reading in the late 1980’s how a .500 on-base percentage would be equivilent to batting .400 now (Wade Boggs was the topic of conversation at the moment), and though the structure of the game seems to have changed since then, that idea has always stuck with me.
Opus1 (and RickJay):
It could have simply been a matter of clubhouse leadership, of changing the atmosphere. I don’t know for sure.
However, there’s a substantial number of BBWA voters who will always think that MVP means being instrumental to their team’s winning. Rightly or wrongly, Stewart stands out as the only player on any of the playoff contenders who can be singled out (as opposed to being part of a larger ensemble, like the Yankees and Red Sox) as having somehow brought about an improvement in his team’s performance.
Look, if I was voting for MVP, I probably would have gone for A-Rod or Posada. But voting for Stewart is hardly the act of extreme irrationality you guys are making it out to be.
(hijack…possibly) Personally, I think we should chuck the “MVP” award, with all its inherent controversies, and rename it the Ted Williams award, to explicitly go to the top position player in each league. No arguments about pitchers winning it, no arguments about “value” to the team vs. “value” as an individual performer. But of course, this is baseball, where nothing is ever allowed to change, so…
Chaim Mattis Keller