Cite please. The big National Websites had variation on Morneu wins MVP and Justin wins. Twins Slugger gets MVP. Outside of NYC papers do you really believe that every headline was “Jeter didn’t win MVP!”
Sounds like a sore winner to me.
BTW: RickJay is of course correct across the board, but as Jeter is my favorite current player, my opinion is of no value in this case.
Jim
It was more of an impression and an exaggeration, but I think most headlines mention Jeter as being edged, while the content of most websites and news shows have the inevitable hand-wringing of some Yankee fan who thinks the system is broken because the award didn’t go to a Yankee.
RickJay, if the writers were all about Ribbies, they’d have given the thing to Ortiz. They obviously look at more than RBI. I’ve always understood it to mean that the award goes to the player whose team needed him the most. That being said, arguments can be made for Ortiz, for Dye, for Thomas, for Jeter, and for Morneau, as well as Mauer. It becomes a subjective thing at that point, with the stat-heads crunching numbers and talking about who had the most RBIs with RISP after the 7th inning with less than 2 run margin between winner and loser, and other people trusting their instincts. If you remove teams that faded from consideration (how valuable is a guy if he doesn’t help his team win?), DH’s and pitchers because of the understandable preference for everyday position players, you’re left with a short list that includes Thomas, Morneau, and Jeter.
My instincts tell me that without Jeter, the Yankees would have been fine. They’d merely move the best shortstop of the young century back where he belongs and go find a third baseman. The Twins without Morneau would have been fighting the Royals for 4th place in the AL Central.
Incidentally, if you really think Jeter deserves MVP because his $200,000,000 team won one more game than the $70,000,000 Twins in a weaker division, then you have no business calling anyone else idiotic.
I hear your blackened, Yankee-loving tears hitting the ground. It has a slight hiss as the acid eats through the floor.
It sounds like…like…sweet sweet victory…sigh
You picked the NY Post, that hardly counts.
Without Morneau, the Twins would still have had a pretty good shot at making the postseason. They did, after all, make it by six games. Six games is a LOT of games to accredit to one player, especially one at a position where there’s lots of talent available. I know it doesn’t sound like that much, but there’s only 15 wins between 96-66 and a .500 season, and teams that go 96-66 usually have a lot of good players to apportion all those wins to. A player who adds six wins to his team’s total is a tremendous player indeed. It’s quite unlikely Morneau was worth seven games or more to his team.
The idea that they’d have been even comparable to Kansas City without Morneau is just silly. Babe Ruth wasn’t that valuable at the height of his powers. Morneau wouldn’t have been that valuable if he’d hit 80 home runs. To be worth 30-35 games to your team you’d have to hit like 200 home runs. NOBODY is that valuable. Without Morneau this is still a first rate ball club.
Er… what the heck are you talking about?
Since I didn’t say that, or anything even remotely resembling that, I continue to have business calling this MVP vote idiotic.
Jeter deserved the MVP because he was the most valuable player in the league. He was better than Morneau, pure and simple; better offensively, better defensively. And I’m no Yankee fan; I dislike them quite a bit, being a Blue Jays fan. Truth is truth, and Morneau was a stupid choice.
This has to be a whoosh. Morneau is an excellent first baseman (better than he gets credit for). Mauer may be one of the best fielding (and of course hitting) catchers in the game today. Jeter is merely adequate in the field. He gets a lot of press for ‘The Play’ vs Oakland a few years back - admittedly a fantastic play - but if ANYONE but the lumbering Giambi is on the basepaths, he’s safe by a country mile. And Giambi might have been safe if he had slid. The truth is, Jeter has below-average range (what do you call a slow grounder to Jeter’s left? A single up the middle!). His fielding percentage isn’t that great - 0.975 (15 errors in 610 chances, compared to Morneau’s .994, only 8 errors in 1,416 chances).
The Twins won perhaps the toughest division in baseball by 6 games. The Yankees won a much easier division by 10 games. Regardless of ‘how many games’ an individual player is worth, it’s pretty clear that the Yankees had a bigger buffer in an easier division had Jeter not been there, compared to the Twins if Morneau (or Maeur) had gone down.
Honestly, I think Mauer was the true MVP. And I’m not saying that September wins are more valuable than June - I am saying that voters (not necessarily wrongly) tend to focus more on players playing well through the end of the season. Mauer’s production tailed off a bit near the end of the summer (but did pick up somewhat in September) while Morneau played pretty well almost the entire year, after a slow start.
In any event, either Morneau or Mauer were better choices than Jeter for MVP. We can argue who was the better player, but it’s pretty clear to me that either M was more valuable to his team than Jeter.
RickJay, I must have misread your post where you mentioned the records of both teams and said Jeter put more wins in the W column. Apparently you didn’t mean Jeter deserves credit because the Yankees won more games overall, but by some mystical sabermetric numerology have determined exactly how many wins Jeter is accountable for versus Morneau. Do whatever numerology you want, but spare us the “pure and simple,” and “stupid,” since there are good reasons to believe that Morneau was more essential to the Twins’ success than Jeter was to the Yankees.
He’s not bad at all, but a first baseman simply does not have the defensive value of a shortstop.
Even if he’s merely adequate (and I agree that’s so - believe me, I’ve argued it many times on this board) Jeter is more valuable defensively than any first baseman in the major leagues. Comparing Jeter to the average shortstop and Morneau to the average first baseman misses the central point that shortstops are more valuable than first basemen, which is why they’re the best overall defensive players on the field.
I would agree with your implication that Joe Mauer is far, far more valuable with the glove than either Jeter or Morneau; catcher is also a crucial defensive position and Mauer is as good at it as anyone. Mauer, not Morneau, was the Twins’ MVP, in my opinion, for that reason.
So? It makes no sense at all to claim Justin Morneau is a more valuable player than Derek Jeter because the White Sox won three or four games more than the Blue Jays. Jeter would not become more valuable if Toronto had managed to eke out 91 wins; his performance, Morneau’s performance, and their own teams’ performances would have been the same.
This strikes me as being similar to the 1995 award, which many justified giving to Mo Vaughn instead of the vastly more deserving Albert Belle because Cleveland won theie division by too many games. It’s ridiculous; since no player in the league is worth a full ten games, does this mean New York had no valuable players? How does a team without any valuable players win a division title, anyway? Are we from now on only going to give MVP Awards to players from teams who just barely made the playoffs?
New York won 97 games, Minnesota 96. The amount of value represented by the players of the two teams is essentially the same, and so the value of their respective individual players must add up to the same amount. New York’s 97 wins cannot be LESS valuable than Minnesota’s 96 just because Toronto kept throwing Josh Towers out there and so went 87-75 instead of, say, 91-71. Penalizing Jeter because his team won their division by more games is… well, it’s kind of insane, really.
What an odd definition of “enormous respect.”
This is the crux of the biscuit. The NY (and elsewhere) media is whining precisely because of this very logic. How many Twins were in MVP contention? How many Yankees were? So how can you denigrate a Yankee because he’s surrounded by too much talent to be individually valuable? If anything, that logic should preclude voting for a Twin.
(Said the guy who hates not only the Yankees, but baseball itself. I can smell bullshit in any sport.)
Well, a lot of people did say Morneau shouldn’t win it because he plays with Santana and Mauer. That doesn’t mean Jeter should win it because Morneau plays with those guys. My only point is that it’s overboard to say the sports writers were “idiotic” because Morneau won.
All right, I’ll bite:
Rick: I’m not particularly interested in arguing Morneau’s case; I don’t like that pick, and think Jeter would have been a better candidate if they were the only two choices. However, I would like to hear the case for favoring Jeter over Mauer. Mauer’s on-base and slugging averages were both higher than Jeter’s, and he played considerably superior defensively at a position that is no less important than shortstop. Jeter is pretty evidently a better baserunner, and played more games.
Why Jeter over Mauer (I would certainly have voted for Mauer first, and probably Travis Hafner second, then Jeter)?
Why is that? Fielding his position is not Jeter’s forte; he’s an average shortstop at best. But he is an above-average hitter, and - as much as I disagree with using ‘intangibles’ to decide the MVP award - I definitely agree that intangibles are important in the overall scheme of things, and Jeter has 'em in spades. He plays smart, he always seems to get the clutch hit, he hustles and gives 110% all the time - and when’s the last time you heard him yelling at a reporter, or punching a camera man, or getting into a drunken brawl at a bar? Perhaps the best barometer - he’s well-liked and respected in a locker room of stars, and he’s scandal free in the toughest media market in the world.
Do I think he was MVP this year? No. Doesn’t mean I can’t agree that he is a great player.
The mvp sunk into irrelevancy when Andre Dawson won it with a last place team. It became a joke. If he wasn’t there they would have finished last. With him they finished last.
I withdraw my criticism.
If Mauer had won the award I frankly would think it was a decent choice. I’d still place Jeter first on my ballot but it’s a small margin and I couldn’t complain about Mauer winning the award.
Basically, I think Jeter rates ahead of Mauer because his offensive contribution just makes up for Mauer’s superior glovework, at least according to the analytical stats; that’s largely because, while Mauer had better rates, he obviously didn’t play quite as much. But it’s a very close call.
I disagree, though, with placing Hafner ahead of Jeter. He was the best hitter in the league, percentages-wise, but played far fewer games than the other major candidates, due to his injury, and that takes away from his overall impact. And being a DH, he has zero defensive value.
Postscript on Jim’s story:
Jeter, who was with his current girlfriend, Jessica Biel, understandably refused to feel sorry for himself.
What Exit?, another annecdotal example, one of the news alert cites I subscribe to (general news, not sports) buzzed my cell with this headline, “Jeter narrowly loses AL MVP”
As for the award, I was surprised. Not because Jeter lost, but because of who won. I am an moderate baseball fan (it is way behind football and basketball) and I live in an NL city, but I had never HEARD of Morneau. I was really embarrassed because I thought I was a more educated fan.
As for a NY/Boston bias, I would argue it is more noticeable in the Hall of Fame voting or in assessing players long after they’ve retired. You were always a little greater if you played for the Yankees or the Celtics.
If Joe Dimaggio had played his whole career for the Milwaukee Brewers, his statue at Cooperstown would be dusty.
Playing in Milwaukee didn’t seem to hurt Hank Aaron’s popularity.