Biggest controversies in MVP, Cy Young, ROY voting

The Game Room
1

This thread had a discussion that had me looking through a lot of ROY voting. Baseball-reference.com has all ROY, Cy Young and MVP on one page - and I landed on the 1998 page. The NL Cy Young voting seems especially horrible. Tom Glavine walked away with the hardware. Please try to pick his line out of the following vote getters:

18-7, 2.38 ERA, 1.07 WHIP, 257 K, 49 BB, 257 IP
20-6, 2.47 ERA, 1.20 WHIP, 157 K, 74 BB, 229.1 IP
19-11, 3.28 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, 329 K, 86 BB, 244.1 IP
18-9, 2.22 ERA, 0.98 WHIP, 204 K, 45 BB, 251 IP

Of course, back in '98 only one of those stats mattered - 20. Glavine hitting 20 wins was certainly more important than teammate Greg Maddux allowing less than one baserunner an inning, right? Randy Johnson got screwed because his 329 Ks were spread out over both the AL and NL - so his line actually only looks like 10-1, 1.28, 0.98, 116, 26, 84.1. But most absurd of all is that Trevor Hoffman got the most 1st place votes, as a closer, that year!

And for the MVP, there’s always the yearly argument over what “valuable” means. Some think that no one could possibly be valuable on a losing team, and will only vote for players on winning teams. But the famous one is the 1941 AL MVP, which DiMaggio won over Ted Williams.

Ted: 37 HR, 120 RBI, .406/.553/.735, 147 BB, 27 K
Joe: 30 HR, 125 RBI, .357/.440/.643, 76 BB, 13 K

That, of course, doesn’t include fielding (which probably goes to Joe, as a CF). Those are decently close numbers (I always love to see the K/BB of the greats back in the day - they just *hated *to strikeout!), and doesn’t reflect Joe’s 56 game hitting streak. But this probably wasn’t as bad as Joe beating Ted, again (by one point), when Williams won the friggin’ Triple Crown (and with 2 first place votes going to a guy who hit .206).

And of course, Eckersley winning MVP in '92 was just silly.

2

So I can figure out who I would’ve given the Cy to, could you please ID the other 2 pitchers?

3

Oh, sorry, looks like my second link is incorrect! As listed, they are:

Kevin Brown
Tom Glavine
Randy Johnson
Greg Maddux

4

My ballot:

Maddux
Brown
“Unit”
Glavine

5

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking - though I certainly understand dropping Unit down there because of his half season.

6

Controversies or bad choices?

Bad choice: Mo Vaughn over Albert Belle in 1995. Belle was better than Vaughn in every offensive category (they tied with RBIs) and his team won more games. It boiled down to the fact that Belle was a jerk and Vaughn a nice guy.

Edgar Martinez also had as good a year as Vaughn (fewer RBIs, but much better BA and OPS), but he was a DH and thus many voters ignored hime.

Not controversial, but if one voter split his vote for NL ROY in 1968, giving half a vote to Johnny Bench and another half to Jerry Koosman. If he had voted for Koosman, he would have gotten what he wanted: a tie.

7

I think we’d all be better off if everybody just acknowledged that these are all narrative awards, and that it’s only rarely and incidentally the case that the person who wins the award for the most valuable X is actually the most objectively valuable X. It would make these things easier to stomach if they called it, like, the National League Hero Batsman award.

As long as we’re still pretending the award actually goes to the most “valuable” or “best” player and pitcher, I feel like they get it wrong far more often than not. One thing is that the epochal players generally keep being great, but they don’t always keep winning awards for it. Albert Pujols has been the most valuable player in the National League on every day, and for every individual season, since Bonds disappeared – both as a statement of my opinion and statistically, if you accept WAR as a shorthand for value. He’s got 3 MVPs out of 10 years to show for it. A-Rod is probably even sillier – 3 times in 18 seasons he was the best player in the AL?

I’ll play the would-you-rather game, too. Which of these players deserves the MVP more?

  1. 108 R 204 H 34 HR 131 RBI 7 SB 38 BB .308/.354/.508; 5.2 WAR (negative six fielding runs at SS).
  2. 125 R 187 H 57 HR 142 RBI 9 SB 87 BB .300/.392/.623; 8.2 WAR (plus one fielding run at SS).

Did you pick the guy who didn’t have a .350 on-base? That was A-Rod. The other was Miguel Tejada, your 2002 AL Heroic Batsman, the 11th-best player in the league that year by WAR.

What I mean by narrative award is that, if you didn’t reconstruct the scenario using other information that has nothing to do with the individual players, you could never come up with a justification for a pick like that, or a pick like Jimmy Rollins in 2007, or Juan Gonzalez in 1998, or Justin Morneau in 2006. If you just go look at the voting, there’s nothing, or almost nothing, to distinguish those guys in any way from other players who had superior years. You have to know the storyline of the season to understand why those guys won awards. Which is fine, from a certain perspective, I think; I just wish that was the perspective we acknowledged we were taking.

Historical bonus outrage: in 1944, Marty Marion won the NL MVP. He batted .267 with 26 doubles and six home runs, driving in 63. He was a phenomenal defensive shortstop, which accounts for how he got to 4.0 WAR, which is, you know, a good player. His teammate, whose name was Stanley F. Musial, hit .349/.440/.549, leading the league in hits, doubles, on-base, slugging, OPS+ (and had a higher WAR – 9.1 – by 50% over everybody in the league). This was the rest of his team.

8

1996, I meant. He didn’t deserve it in 1998 but it wasn’t as bad.

9

The 1990 American League CY was pretty bad - Bob Welch with his 27 wins and 2.95 ERA over Roger Clemens, who was 21-6 with a 1.93. But I think Vaughn over Belle in '95 was the most egregious since I’ve been following baseball closely.

10

I like that description. It’s bizarre how random some of them are when you take them out of context.

11

Sub-question, inspired by the OP: how many other times has the winner of an award failed to receive the most 1st-place votes (in baseball or any other sport)? The last time I went browsing the old awards voting I didn’t see any; even the votes that were very close could have been decided without looking beyond the first name on the ballots.

12

How about the 2005 AL Cy Young voting?

Pitcher A: 21-8, 3.48 ERA, 222.2 IP, 157 K, 43 BB, 1.16 WHIP, 3.75 FIP
Pitcher B: 16-7, 2.87 ERA, 231.2 IP, 238 K, 45 BB, 0.97 WHIP, 2.80 FIP

Pitcher A, of course, won the award, because he was better in the one category that counts, WINZ. He’s Bartolo Colon.

Pitcher B is Johan Santana.

13

One award I always had a problem with was Guillermo (Willie) Hernandez as AL MVP in 1984. I guess they had to give it to somebody on the Detroit Tigers that year but it seemed to me that Hernandez, while good, didn’t particularly stand out over the others. It was truly a team effort. I would’ve given it to Alan Trammell but it’s my belief AL MVP voters did want to give the award to a shortstop for a third consecutive season.

For comparison’s sake, here are the Tigers’ 1984 team stats.

14

There have been MANY poor selections, but very, very few “controversies.” I mean, VERY few awards selections were so bad that more than a few people still get upset about them today.

I mean, I think stat lovers could make an excellent case that, say, George Brett had a better year in 1985 than Don Mattingly, but hardly anybody was truly angry about Mattingly winning the award then, and fewer are angry about it now.

The only truly controversial MVP awards are probably the two MVP awards that Ted Williams didn’t get in 1942 AND 1947, even though he won the Triple Crown BOTH YEARS. Adding to the controversy is that, allegedly, Ted was left off one ballot COMPLETELY in 1947.

15

Speaking as possibly the biggest Ichiro fan in the universe, I have to say that he was woefully undeserving of the 2001 AL MVP. I think people were just kind of enamored with the novelty of a little Japanese guy hitting over .300 and gunning down Terrance Long at third base that one time. Arguably, he wasn’t even the most valuable player on his own TEAM that year.

But the most egregiously ridiculous result, to me, is Pedro Martinez not winning in '99–despite having the most first-place votes–simply because two guys left him off the ballot completely. IIRC, one of them claimed that it was because he couldn’t vote for a pitcher but actually had voted for TWO of them in the previous year’s MVP vote.

16

The Ichiro thing was definitely a narrative thing - here’s a team that has lost 3 future hall of famers over the past couple years and turns around and has close to the best regular season in history; how could you NOT pick the MVP from that team?

17

While I fully agree that Jason Giambi (who led the league in both on base percentage and slugging) was MUCH more deserving of the MVP award than Ichiro, the 2001 MVP award was NOT controversial. Very few people were outraged at the time, and almost nobody who isn’t a full-time saabremetrician is outraged now.

Really, I have NEVER heard anyone sneering that Ichiro was unworthy. Heck, I’ve never heard anyone bring up the subject, period.

If hardly anybody is arguing about something, it’s not a controversy. Maybe it SHOULD be, but it isn’t.

18

He was, although the legend that it was a Boston writer who left him off, spread by Williams in his book “My Turn at Bat”, is apparently thought. One Boston writer researched it when it happened and said it was a Cleveland or Detroit writer. It should be pointed out that DiMaggio, who won it, was left off of three ballots.

The 1961 American League Rookie of the Year ballot was controversial and went to a moderately talented pitcher, Don Schwall, who didn’t have much of a career.

There are sometimes writers who ignore the rules. Back in 2003 a couple wouldn’t vote for Hideki Matsui, saying they feel that Japanese league players shouldn’t be eligible. Maybe they should not be but they are.

Of course there was the time when Darryl Strawberry didn’t win the 1988 NL MVP and he thought teammate Keith Hernandez campaigned against him, urging writers to vote for teammate Kevin McReynolds. At the team photo the following spring, the two had a brief shoving match.

SI writer had an article recently on how Duke Snider may not have won the 1956 NL MVP because one writer inadvertently left him off his ballot.

19

Heck, I can think of a lot of Cy Young Awards handed out for bizarre reasons.

The 1982 Award went to Pete Vuckovich, in my opinion easily the worst pitcher to ever win the award; he went 18-6 but actually didn’t pitch all that fantastically and was bailed out by his team defensively and offensively. At least ten pitchers deserved it more; Vuckovich should not even have appeared on anyone’s ballot. The winner should have been Dave Stieb, but you could have handed it to many other deserving pitchers.

I’d further argue that every MVP Award given to a relief pitcher was a sad joke.

20

I often don’t even know who has won various awards. As huge a baseball fan as I am, these awards just never seemed very significant to me, and that impression has been reinforced as I’ve learned more about the game.