The MVP award exists in all of the major American sports and probably in other ones I’m not familiar with. Its got a long tradition and as far as I know, its always been called the MVP. However, as it stands, there’s always a discussion every year about the term “valuable”, as in “this player might not be the best, but he’s the most valuable to this team”.
I wonder who created this award and how they wanted it to be used. What sport was it in? How long did it take other sports to adopt it? I can’t imagine the creator had the foresight to have been trying to promote discussion and drama by calling it Most Valuable Player instead of something like like Most Best Player or something similar.
At the same time, we never hear about the actual criteria for these guys to use when voting. “Valuable” is always subjective. When it comes to the NBA, I often here “the best player on the best team” used as criteria but what I want to know is if the league has any guidelines at all for the voters to help them decide how to vote. Obviously, most of them will vote for someone at or near the top, for that particular year, on a team that is pretty good. In the NBA, the only sport I’m more familiar with the voting, there have been times where discussions on the MVP hinge on whether the best player has a winning team or not. Generally, no matter how good you are, if your team’s not good, you’re not getting the vote. Anyone know an MVP voter or heard one discuss what guidelines the league gives them?
I get annoyed when the same discussion happens each year on the meaning of “valuable”. While I don’t doubt the drama has helped fans connect through arguing and debating as fans are wont to do, I’m not sure if the award cannot be replaced with something less annoying subjective each year. I’d personally rather discuss who’s the best player, using metrics and stats and a little bit of fanboyism, than debate over what “valuable” means and then from there another subjective test as to which player is that to his team.
So the Chalmers award was a precursor, and at first it was automatically awarded based on stats? That seems a bit more defensible, if boring. By 1931, when it changed to MVP, was the criteria still highest batting average or did that change before it became the MVP?
In cricket and football, its called “man of the match” for indivdidual matches, and Player/Man of the tournament/series/year for tournaments and leagues. The FIFA World Cup calls it the Golden Ball.
The Chalmers Award only lasted for four seasons (1911-1914). The next version of the award was the League Award, created in 1922; recipients of that award were voted on by a panel of sportswriters. The “modern” version of the award, which started in 1931, was voted on by writers from the start. Thus, the “MVP” award was only purely based on statistics for the four years of the Chalmers Award.
Most of them are independent of the league, with the exception of the NBA’s, and all are voted on by sportswriters, similar to the college level honors, like the Heisman Trophy.
I have a feeling that the biggest issue is that they’re voted on by sportswriters, who IMO, are notorious for bias, bandwagoning, and general stupidity. So you get moronic notions like “best player on best team” which is prima facie stupid, and then on top of that, you get the even more dumb notion that the best player is automatically the quarterback.
Despite my disdain for sportswriters, I really don’t have a better idea of how to do it- it’s not something you can really compare stats on, and it’s hard to say that one player who’s outstanding on one team would be equally outstanding on another. I mean, who’s to say that Cam Newton is naturally more valuable to any team in the league versus say… J.J. Watt?
The Chalmers award was never based on stats. In 1910, a car was awarded to the player with the best batting average, but it wasn’t “The Chalmers Award” yet. After the funkiness around calculating the batting average at the end of 1910 it appears that Chalmers changed his mind and went to the committee vote right at the start of the Chalmers Award, which started in 1911 and lasted until the end of the 1914 season.
Was there ever a discussion in the other leagues to determine whether the imported award from MLB should be renamed/rebranded to something else? A sort of “best player” award, rather than the much more subjective “valuable”, or was the term MVP firmly entrenched by the time the NBA and NFL created theirs?
The NHL Hart Memorial Trophy started in 1923 as a Most Valuable Player award. That’s one year after the League Awards were instituted in MLB. With the Chalmers Award only lasting for 4 years in the previous decade I don’t know if the NHL was that influenced by baseball.
The AP/NFL award didn’t start out as MVP, but it looks like they moved that way fairly early on. It also doesn’t look like they kept very good records back then.
What does “best” player mean? What objective criteria could you use that everyone would agree on? How is it better than “most valuable” or any other locution?
The concept is inherently vague and subjective. You’re going to get arguments over any method. You can’t even get people to agree whether pitchers should be included in the MVP voting. Other sports have similar splits between offensive and defensive players.
Language fixes on convenient and useful terms. Most valuable is old and comfortable. I didn’t include some early uses of “most valuable player” because they simply said a person was a most valuable player on their team, but that means the phrase was already in the sporting vocabulary.
The Cy Young award was created in the mid 1950s for baseball’s best pitcher because Commissioner Ford Frick, a former sports writer, felt pitchers were ignored in the MVP balloting. Naturally the first year, the winner was a pitcher-Don Newcombe. Until 1967 only one award was given, in 1967 they changed it to each league has a Cy Young winner.
Why the presumption that other sports followed the North American lead?
In Australian Football the equivalent of MVP is the “Fairest & Best” award, more commonly known in the reverse i.e. Best & Fairest.
The first of the major leagues to adopt it was South Australia with the Magarey Medal first awarded in 1898.
Subsequently the award was replicated in Western Australia with the Sandover Medal in 1921, then the Victoria Football Association with the Woodham Cup (later the Recorder Cup and then JJ Liston Medal) in 1923 and the Victorian Football League with the Brownlow Medal in 1924. Virtually all minor and junior footy leagues have their own versions.
Voting for these awards has always been the sole prerogative of the umpire/s. The number of votes allocated per game has varied but is now pretty much a standard 3-2-1
A key element, in all leagues I am aware of is if a player is suspended by the relevant judiciary through the season for misconduct they are ineligible to win the B&F award, though any votes earned are counted.
There are instances eg Corry McKernan in 1996 and Chris Grant in 1997 of those who topped the B&F poll but did not win the Brownlow Medal because of ineligibility through suspension.
Unfortunately I forget all the names, but I remember a writer in the NY Post explaining his MVP voting thus–Smith was great, but his team would have done well without him; Jones was great but his team never contended, so I have to go with Brown who kept his team in the wildcard hunt till the very end.
I have always been an advocate of “who had the best season, in my judgment?” I am fine with the title “most valuable player”, rather than, say, " best player", just to acknowledge the subjectivity of it all.