Most teams have played 146 to 148 games as of tonight, so roughly 15 games left.
For the relevant AL teams, the ones chasing the wild card:
Toronto - 1st wild card, 16 games left
Boston - 2nd wild card, 14 games left
Yankees - 0.5 games back, 15 games left
Oakland - 3 games back, 16 games left
Seattle - 4 games back, 16 games left
Ohtani did not look good against the White Sox, even though the Angels won two out of the three games. He had two infield hits in 13 AB, with 7 K’s, plus a walk and a HBP that got Tony LaRussa ejected from the game. I don’t think there’s any question that Vladdy is the better hitter. But Ohtani pitches, which is kind of hard to process because nobody has done it at a high level since Babe Ruth and Double Duty Radcliffe. But if he can’t pitch the rest of the way, and if the Blue Jays make the playoffs, or maybe even if they don’t, I think Vladdy is in.
When you lead the league in home runs, hits, runs, batting average, on-base, slugging, OPS, OPS+ and total bases, you sure oughta win something.
Well one assumes he’ll win the Hank Aaron Award and Silver Slugger, there’s no argument against that. And he’s only 22.
It is saying a hell of a lot about the Blue Jay depth of young talent that Bo Bichette is only the second crown jewel in the team’s crown - a 23-year-old shortstop hitting .293 with power, speed and a pretty solid glove is the kind of player you dream of developing, but he’s overshadowed by the offensive monster at first.
Cards are a half game ahead of San Diego for the second NL wild card. Oh, and the Padres start a three game series in St. Louis tonight.
Well, that depends on what you think WAR is for, I suppose. Do you want your stat to be backward looking (“what actually happened”) or forward looking (“what is likely to happen tomorrow”)? I can see arguments for both, but the trend has been more towards the forward-looking stats, since that is more useful for predicting how good a player or team will be.
Guerrero Jr obviously isn’t the reason that the Jays don’t have 90 wins, so docking him for their under-performance seems wrong to me.
If you want a “what really happened” stat, WPA is fun. It literally just looks at changes in your win probability based on a hitter or pitcher outcome. Here is you hitter’s WPA leaderboard:
| 1. | Tatis • SDP | 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| 2. | Harper • PHI | 4.3 |
| 3. | Ohtani • LAA | 4.2 |
| 4. | Polanco • MIN | 4.1 |
| 5. | Soto • WSN | 3.7 |
| 6. | Perez • KCR | 3.7 |
| 7. | Judge • NYY | 3.5 |
| 8. | Freeman • ATL | 3.4 |
| 9. | Marte • 2TM | 3.3 |
| 10. | Guerrero • TOR | 3.3 |
We’re taking about the MVP Award, so “what has already happened” is the only relevant issue. How these guys will play in 2022 has no bearing on who deserves the award in 2021.
The point is not to “dock” him for them not winning 90 games. It’s to ascertain his actual value. The Blue Jays, as a team, cannot collectively have 90 wins worth of value, as Baseball Reference claims. That isn’t possible, because they have not won 90 games. Everything about sabermetrics in calculating actual player value MUST add up to the actual number of games a team wins, or it’s not accurate.
If there is a fact based argument for why other Blue Jays players should have their WAR reduced, but not Guerrero, to get the number back to 82 wins (about 42 WAR, in total) then that would make the figure even more accurate, I guess.
Now, if you were trying to figure out how Ohtani or Guerrero will do in the future, that’s a different story.
That’s fair, I suppose. But I’m not sure of your claim that the Blue Jays can’t have 90 wins worth of value. You are basically saying that no matter how much their win total is actually due to luck (sequencing, BABIP, etc) it is somehow intrinsically their players fault that they have 82 wins.
I’m imagining some perverse world in which Guerrero literally hits a Home Run every time he is up, but the rest of the team is terrible and loses every game. Clearly he is still the MVP, even though by your claims he cannot have more than 0 WAR.
Trying to separate the individual from the team is one of the points of WAR, and if you agree that some portion of a team win total is luck, not skill, then it makes sense to assign WAR based on runs and not wins.
My bigger issues with the WAR calculations actually have to do with defensive metrics, which I just don’t believe are robust enough to be included to the extent they are.
Either way I think Ohtani is a better MVP choice, even if the Jays do end up in the playoffs and Vlad Jr passes him on the WAR leaderboard.
That isn’t his claim. The entirety of the Blue Jays roster cannot have more than 0 WAR. Vladdy could certainly compile an other-worldly 20 WAR, and the rest of the team a -20 WAR, netting out to 0 wins.
/facepalm. Of course. Sorry about that.
We’re really talking about teams that are way off their expected wins, and what to do about individual player WAR, which is calculated based on Runs. I guess I don’t really have a problem with it, but I suppose a mental adjustment could be made if you think that somehow Vlad Jr is to “blame” for them not winning more games.
Semien is a monster too. Any chance of Toronto re-signing him?
As for the actual debate between Ohtani and Vlad, I think it’s clearly Ohtani. I’m usually a very big proponent of WAR and other good objective evaluations. But I’m still a little iffy on WAR for pitchers, as it’s so closely tied to innings pitched, and it’s certainly an imperfect measurement for a unicorn like Ohtani. The biggest factor missing is how it gives a team so much roster flexibility (and it kind of messes with my mind how a team would benefit by a hypothetical two-way player who was defensively a utility infielder).
I could care less about the general success of the players’ respective teams - it’s an individual award, not a team award. I’m sure if given the opportunity, Jas09’s 162 HR Vlad would be the most coveted player in history, regardless of his team’s 0 wins.
That is exactly what I’m saying. If the team wins 82 games, they have 82 wins of value.
Actually, no, he would clearly NOT be the MVP, since he would not have actually helped his team win any games at all. (As Munch points out he could still in theory have a positive WAR, though.) Of course there’s no way this could happen, and if it did it’d be a fluke and I’d still want him on my team, but a player must contribute in some way to his team winning games to have value.
I disagree with this. I don’t see the need to tie “value” to “team outcome”. Such a player is immensely valuable.
No doubt such a player is likely to be valuable in the future. But if we are judging his contributions in the PAST, some connection to team wins must exist to make the term “valuable” meaningful.
What exactly are we calling “value” if it has no connection to winning baseball games? Isn’t winning baseball games the point of baseball?
For the most part we don’t need to worry about specifically connecting a hitter’s achievements to specific wins because if a guy plays 157 games or whatever it’ll probably even out, 99.9% of the time. If a guy is worth about 7 WAR, he was probably turn a 75-87 team into an 82-80 team and a 90-win team into a 97-65 team, more or less; MLB teams are within a sufficiently narrow window of relative quality that it really doesn’t much matter. But there are some odd situations; players WILL sometimes have extremes of clutch performance, for instance.
Isn’t this exactly why we have stats like WAR, so we can separate individual performance and value from team performance? I can’t imagine seeing such a player dominate a game, but is hampered by 8 incompetent teammates and say “that guy just isn’t valuable”. Of course he’s valuable - every GM in the league would want him on their team.
Meanwhile, last night in Arlington, Yonny Hernandez was kind enough to demonstrate exactly what I would look like attempting to hit major league pitching:
But the point of WAR is that it’s “Wins Above Replacement.” It is supposed to try to answer the question of how many baseball games the player caused his team to win.
But that’s a very different question from “who was the most valuable player in the past season”? Of course the answer to that question isn’t necessarily the same as “who would you rather have next season?” Those are entirely different questions.
I think this is a forced view of the meaning of “value”. Teams trade for superstars on shitty teams all the time, for the simple reason being they are valuable.
For instance, Fangraph’s white paper on their version of WAR states that it is a measure of a player’s value.
WAR is not meant to be a perfectly precise indicator of a player’s contribution, but rather an estimate of their value to date.