Please read posts before responding to them. I said the opposite. :rolleyes:
hawkeyeop, it looked like the most probable explanation. He was already 24, so I placed little weight on the age/maturity explanation. I’m happy to have been wrong about him.
Don’t be silly. Link. Boston SMSA rank #10, Baltimore #20. But in addition, the fan base for Boston covers all of New England except SW CT, and much of eastern Canada for that matter, while Baltimore’s is really just MD and maybe not even the DC suburbs anymore.
Admittedly, this is an ambiguous, poorly-constructed sentence, so it’s possible that there might be more than one interpretation. But it seems to suggest that Joe Mauer is “not necessarily the best team player.” So, i reiterate my question: how do you know what sort of team player he is?
It is a travesty when a player on a last place team wins the MVP. They finished last with him. If he wasn’t there, they would have finished last. What impact did he have, padded statistics. He played a season without the pressure of a pennant race and relaxed all year long. It was a pressureless game. Most Valuable Player must impact a team. A last place team can not have the MVP.
Perhaps this is true of the gonzomax Most Important to a Winning Team award, but the instructions given to actual Major League Baseball MVP voters read:
To repeat, The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.
It is only a travesty if you would have the voters completely disregard the instructions they are given.
Are you including Cy Young in this? Or specifically, literally, the MVP award? Because I think you’re right about MVP, but would be wrong about Cy Young — the best pitcher can be on a terrible team. The classic example is Steve Carlton, who won almost half the Phillies’ games in 1972.
I think i’m going to have to stay out of the whole MVP debate, because this line of argument seems so irrational and nonsensical to me that i feel like we’re talking different languages. It might be a congenital failing on my part, but i literally do not understand how someone could arrive at this position.
All I can figure is that people with this opinion (and I concede there are a lot of them) overestimate the extent to which baseball is a team game. It’s really not. It is a series of individual contests that add up to a team result. There are a few plays that require teamwork (pick-offs, double plays, relay throws) but the vast majority of offensive, defensive, and pitching plays are 100% individual efforts. Once you make this leap it’s much easier to see how an MVP can come from a losing (or in fact last place) team.
Each player contributes a certain amount to a teams success. The one that contributes the most is the MVP. The overall quantity of team success is irrelevant.
Cy Young award is different. As a matter of fact ,it is harder to pitch well for a bad team. They are missing something to be last, like hitting or defense. So that would show real pitching. A guy winning 20 with a powerhouse could be a far less effective pitcher.
I disagree. It is not called the best offensive statistics award. it is called the Most Valuable Player Award. How can you be the most valuable when your team came in last. ? They would have finished last if you broke your leg on opening day. With your fine playing they came in last. They have lots of awards that do not imply team player.
Silver Slugger- top player at each position
Gold Glove- best fielder
Comeback player
rookie of the year
relief pitcher award
Cy Young
Hank AAron award- top hitter in each league
None of those imply value to the team.
How about Best Player Award. Then you might have a leg to stand on. As long as it says most valuable .you have to determine value to the team. What value can be ascertained from a last place team? If you are correct, the award is badly misnamed.
The value a player adds to the team is essentially the same whether the team is a good one or a bad one. A good player will help a team win more games than they would have won without him. Winning games is what teams try to do every time they step onto the field, so helping a team win more of them is, by any measure, valuable.
If a team will win 85 games without Player X, and 95 games with Player X, then player X has added 10 wins for the team. The crazy stat people even have a name for this: Wins Above Replacement Player, or WARP (That’s oversimplifying a bit, because WARP measures against a baseline of replacement-level [i.e., really crappy] player, and most Major League teams have people they can call on who are better than replacement level).)
If a team will win 65 games without Player Y, and 75 games with player Y, then Player Y has added 10 wins for the team.
One could even make a pretty strong argument that Player Y has, by this measurement, been more valuable than Player X. After all, by adding 10 wins, Player X increased his team’s win total by 11.76%. But Player Y, by adding 10 wins, has increased his team’s win total by 15.38%.
If you’re going to define “most valuable” in your highly subjective and arbitrary way, rather than as a measure of how well the player actually played during the season, you also have to be aware of some of the other possible contradictions. After all, if this is true:
then Ichiro Suzuki shouldn’t have won the AL MVP in 2001. Just replace the word “last” with “first,” and the word “with” with “without.”
Sure, he had a great year, but the Mariners won their division by such a huge margin that they could have put a replacement-level player in place of Ichiro and still won the division. By the most generous metric, Ichiro was worth about 10 wins to the Mariners in 2001, above a replacement-level player. They won the division by 14 games, and if Ichiro had broken his leg on opening day they had at least two or three players better than replacement-level who could have taken his place. If they would have won without him, how was he valuable to them?
Your system, if taken to its logical conclusion, makes it hard to award the MVP to ANY player on a really deep team, because it can always be argued that the team is so strong that it would have made the playoffs even if that one player had been missing.
I’d be interested to know if there’s any evidence of the thought processes that went into the name. I’m betting that they stood around and said something like:
Or something like that. They probably never realized that people would be irrational enough to exclude players who were the best, but who were unlucky enough to play for below-average teams.
Yankees won with Gaudin starting and pitching 4and 2/3rds well and then not getting out of the 5th. Angels scratched out 5 runs to equal the 5 the Yanks got on homers. In the ninth, A-Rod knocked in the go ahead on a sacrifice fly. Rivera put the game away for another save.
Meanwhile the Rangers and Sox both lost and the Yanks clinched the Wild Card, first team to lock in a playoff berth. They also reduced the magic number for the Division to only 6. They have a 5½ game lead for home field.
Biggest Yankees problem is a 4th starter which they probably won’t need for the first round. Concerns are Andy Pettitte and AJ who both looked good in their last starts. AJ goes today in an afternoon game. It is a big test for him, especially against this Angel’s team at their house. CC & the bullpen look solid as does the line-up and the defense.
If the Yanks make it out of the first round, they might opt for game 4 as a mix and match game. Start Gaudin and only plan to use him for 3-4 innings. Roll Ace & Joba in as needed to get through 6+ and then go to Coke, Hughes and Mo to close it out.
Brian Bruney might not make the post season roster. He never recovered his Spring Training and early season form after returning from his injury. I’m not sure why, but Bruney looks like he might just be one of those injury prone players. Hugh talent but something always derails his seasons. It looks like Robertson will be back and ready to pitch and will probably make the first round. Others are auditioning.
The bench is mostly settled barring injury. The Yanks won’t carry three catchers so Cervelli will have to watch and mentally prepare to take over the backup catcher job next year. Pena might make it as a utility man. Gardner is a sure thing. His defense and speed guarantee his spot.
As to the MVP: Unlike the other awards it is not best player, but most valuable. This precludes non-contending teams in most cases. It has been that way from the beginning of the award. All other awards I can think of are strictly talent based in theory, though the Gold Glove is often based on who knows what. As the Twins are at least contending, I see no reason why Mauer should not be the MVP this year. However, Cabrera of the Tigers and Teix from the Yanks were both legit contenders when in early September it looked liked the Twins were heading under .500. Jeter was worthy of mention, but never had a shot.
I wonder who would win those awards.