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Let’s start by stating the obvious, or at least what should be obvious to anyone reading this at Baseball Prospectus: Joe Mauer is by far the most qualified player for the 2009 AL Most Valuable Player Award. You know it, I know it, even many enlightened sportswriters know it. Despite a few recent rumblings in the mainstream media putting forward a slew of other possibilities, most of them clad in the throwback uniforms of “run producer” and “winner,” Mauer’s numbers are so compelling that even Joe Sheehan has expressed little doubt that voters will get this one right in the end.

I, for one, am not so sure. Mauer’s case is so strong that even the law firm of Sebben & Sebben should be able to successfully argue it. BP readers can be easily wooed by Mauer’s commanding lead in EqA, VORP, and WARP-but those unlikely to sway many actual voters. However, it should be hard for even the casual fan to miss the fact that Mauer is currently leading the league in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage, clocking in at a robust .378/.449/.635 through Sunday’s action. The last time a catcher managed to win this “Slash Stat Triple Crown”, or SSTC, was… well, actually, no catcher has ever done that before. Only nine players have managed it in the last 70 years, seven of them corner outfielders or first basemen. Clearly, such production from a player at a premium defensive position is extremely rare. So how likely is it that Mauer will win the SSTC?

To get some sense of how likely Mauer is to keep his leads in all three stats, I’m going to stand on the shoulders of giants and appropriate the method Eric Seidman recently used to roughly gauge the chances of Albert Pujols winning the standard AVG/HR/RBI Triple Crown. Eric’s method was to look at Pujols’ current number in a given stat (say, RBI), use his updated PECOTA forecast to determine what his final RBI number is projected to be, and then apply a binomial distribution calculation to determine the chance that each other player competing for the title would wind up with more RBI than Pujols, based on their projection for the rest of the season. Summing these chances for each player and subtracting the sum from one approximates the percentage chance Pujols has of winning the RBI crown, while performing the same calculation for the other two categories and multiplying the three results gives a rough idea of the likelihood of winning the Triple Crown.

The charts below show similar calculations for Mauer in each leg of the Slash Stat Triple Crown. I’ve modified Eric’s method slightly to be even more pessimistic by calculating the chance that Mauer would drop down to the current level of his closest pursuer, not that player’s (lower) end of season forecast-essentially, what would happen if the player in second place continued at his current level. I did this mostly because of Ichiro; PECOTA is notoriously bearish on his ability to sustain such high batting averages, but for this purpose I’d rather assume that he can:


Slash Stat Forecasts
                          Forecast
                Current    Ending
Player            OBP       OBP       % Chance of Rank Change
Joe Mauer        .449      .439       3.4% Drop to .420
Kevin Youkilis   .420      .412       0.4% Raise to .439
Total                             1 - 3.8% = 96.2% chance of winning OBP

                         Forecast
                Current   Ending
Player            AVG      AVG       % Chance of Rank Change
Joe Mauer        .378     .364       30.5% Drop to .359
Ichiro Suzuki    .359     .349        4.6% Raise to .364
Total                            1  -35.1% = 64.9% chance of winning AVG

                         Forecast
                Current   Ending
Player            SLG      SLG       % Chance of Rank Change
Joe Mauer        .635     .599        0.7% Drop to .572
Kendry Morales   .572     .551        0.0% Raise to .599
Kevin Youkilis   .570     .557        0.0% Raise to .599
Total                             1 - 0.7% = 99.3% chance of winning SLG

Likelihood of Slash Stat Triple Crown:  62% (96.2% * 64.9% * 99.3%)

With such large leads in each category, even using a slightly more pessimistic version of Eric’s calculation leaves Mauer with a 62 percent chance of winning the Slash Stat Triple Crown-the biggest threat, as expected, is Ichiro winning the batting title.

But does winning the SSTC ensure winning the MVP trophy? Given the checkered history of MVP voting, there are likely no guarantees. To get a better idea, let’s take a look at the 15 previous SSTC-winning seasons since the outbreak of World War II and how they fared with MVP voters:


Slash Stat Triple Crown Winners (since 1939)
                                                   MVP    MVP
                                  MVP  RBI  Team   RBI    Team
Player            Team      YEAR  Rank Rank Finish Rank  Finish  MVP
Barry Bonds       Giants    2004    1   17   2nd    --    --      --
Barry Bonds       Giants    2002    1    6   2nd    --    --      --
Todd Helton       Rockies   2000    5    1   4th     4    1st    Jeff Kent
Larry Walker      Rockies   1999   10   10   5th    17    1st    Chipper Jones
George Brett      Royals    1980    1    2   1st      --    --       --
Fred Lynn         Red Sox   1979    4    4   3rd     1    1st    Don Baylor
Carl Yastrzemski* Red Sox   1967    1    1   1st    --    --      --
Frank Robinson*   Orioles   1966    1    1   1st    --    --      --
Ted Williams      Red Sox   1957    2   10   3rd     5    1st    Mickey Mantle
Ted Williams      Red Sox   1948    3    3   2nd     8    1st    Lou Boudreau
Stan Musial       Cardinals 1948    1    1   2nd    --    --      --
Ted Williams*     Red Sox   1947    2    1   3rd     3    1st    Joe DiMaggio
Stan Musial       Cardinals 1943    1    5   1st    --    --      --
Ted Williams*     Red Sox   1942    2    1   2nd     4    1st    Joe Gordon
Ted Williams      Red Sox   1941    2    4   2nd     1    1st    Joe DiMaggio
*: Won Standard Triple Crown

Here we see each SSTC season, how the player ranked in MVP voting and in that season’s RBI counts, where the player’s team finished in the standings, and (if applicable) the actual MVP’s rank in RBI and his team’s finish. Since the conventional wisdom is that high RBI totals and playing for a division winner are given disproportionate weight by the voters, including those columns might provide some anecdotal evidence to that effect.

Of the 15 SSTC seasons listed above, only seven actually resulted in an MVP Award. The remainder had one thing in common: the SSTC winner’s team didn’t finish first, while the MVP’s team did. This certainly lends credence to the idea that MVP voters often look for the best player on the best team, rather than the best player overall. With the Twins struggling to gain any traction in the AL Central race, this may be bad news for Joe Mauer’s MVP chances. Interestingly, only twice did the MVP tally more RBI than the SSTC winner-perhaps winning is given more weight than driving in runs in the hearts and minds of the voters.

Recent members of this list may point towards more nuance in the selections of contemporary voters. Barry Bonds was able to overcome second-place finishes, pedestrian RBI totals, and a chilly relationship with the media to win MVP Awards in his two SSTC seasons-all he had to do was log a half-decade of otherworldly production. The bad showings by Helton and Walker, however, indicate that voters have shown themselves capable of looking beyond ballpark-inflated raw numbers. Brett’s 1980 season, when he flirted with .400, was the last SSTC winner in the American League, and a deserved slam-dunk for MVP voters.

On the other hand, the 1979 vote, with Fred Lynn finishing fourth, defies explanation. In addition to the three slash stats, Lynn paced the American League that season in EqA (.343) and VORP (82.9). His 39 dingers were only surpassed by Gorman Thomas, his 122 RBI placed a solid fourth in the league, and he won a Gold Glove in center field. But the voters saw fit to bestow the MVP on Don Baylor and his .313 EqA, earned while spending significant time at DH. Baylor did lead the league in RBI, and his Angels squad managed to win a weak AL West-albeit with three fewer wins than Lynn’s Red Sox, who finished third behind dynasties in New York and Baltimore. Brett and Ken Singleton also finished ahead of Lynn that year-defensible choices, those-but Don Baylor? I guess disco made the whole world crazy.

Yaz and Robby each won MVPs after pulling off the rare “Triple Crown Royal,” winning both the standard Triple Crown and the SSTC for their pennant-winning squads, although Yastrzemski deserves an asterisk for sharing the home run title with Harmon Killebrew. But Ted Williams, as usual, has a story all his own. At what should we most marvel? The fact that Teddy Ballgame led the AL in all three slash stats five times over a 16-year span, while fighting two wars? Or that he never won the MVP in any of those five seasons, despite also winning the standard Triple Crown in two of them? Each time, Williams was beaten by a player at a premium defensive position on a team that finished first in the standings. Losing twice to DiMaggio and once to Mantle is understandable, as is Lou Boudreau’s win as Cleveland’s shortstop/manager in 1948. But winning the Triple Crown in 1942 but losing the MVP vote to Joe Gordon? That had to sting. Williams won an MVP in 1946 when Boston won the pennant, and again in 1949 when DiMaggio was injured for much of the year and no single Yankee garnered enough support. But the message is clear-being the dominant hitter in a given season does not guarantee you any hardware unless you’re still playing in October.

If Joe Mauer stays reasonably healthy and productive for the next month, there’s little doubt he’ll have been the most valuable player in the American League. But that doesn’t guarantee he’ll be the Most Valuable Player. How productive his teammates are over the next month may have just as much say, whether we like it or not.

Thank you for reading

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crperry13
8/26
Great article Ken, my favorite of yours since BP Idol.
irablum
8/26
Great article!! btw, how has the Wild Card affected MVP awards? Has any player on a wild card team seen the same kind of preference that division leaders get?
BillJohnson
8/26
"But the message is clear—being the dominant hitter in a given season does not guarantee you any hardware unless you’re still playing in October." I think the message is clear, but different: sportswriters REALLY disliked Ted Williams. Remember that in his awe-inspiring 1941 season, he got jobbed out of MVP partly because a voter from his own city famously left him off his ballot entirely. Placing him second to DiMaggio on a ballot, as several voters did that year, displays a perhaps debatable emphasis on post-season hardware rather than in-season brilliance. Omitting him from the ballot altogether simply says that the voter is an idiot.
NathanJM
8/26
Wow, who did Ted Williams tick off?
JasonC23
8/26
Everybody?
Vyse0wnz
8/28
How/why?
Lassaller
8/28
At the time (~1944) there were eight newspapers in Boston and they all needed the best headline to attract readers. So, in an effort to survive, sportswriters who were once gracious and gentlemanly became, well, attack dogs.

The opening salvo was from Harold Kaese from the Boston Transcript, who wrote that Williams was jealous of his batterymate Jimmy Foxx (for batting fourth while Williams swapped to third), he didn't like Fenway Park, and, possibly worst of all, insinuated that he had questionable moral character as he did not visit his parents back in San Diego over the winter.

From there things became much worse.
bsolow
8/26
I'm not entirely sure that this estimation procedure is particularly accurate, although it's also possible that I'm not understanding it properly. If the idea is that you're taking binomial probabilities of either Mauer sinking to a lower level OR whoever's second rising to his level, that ignores a whole host of possibilities for Mauer being overtaken in between levels. For instance, there's a 30.5% chance that Mauer drops to .359 in batting average, but there's also some probability density that he drops to .360 and Ichiro increases his batting average by 1 point, and my guess is that situations like that are not insignificant in doing this type of estimation. My guess would be that 62% is an overestimate of Mauer's chances of reaching the SSTC.

That being said, I think the second half of the article is extremely interesting and Ted Williams' struggles probably highlight the importance of personality/sucking up to sportswriters.
kenfunck
8/26
I think you're understanding it properly, and I agree it's not going to be extremely accurate -- as Eric explained in his article, this is going to give a "ballpark figure" at best. My short-cut way to address the "meeting in the middle" issue a little bit was to calculate the chances of Mauer sinking below Ichiro's current batting average of .359 instead of PECOTA's end projection of .349 (and the same for SLG and OBP).
andland
8/27
You piqued my curiosity, so I decided to do 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations to see what the chances of Joe Mauer winning the SSTC are. Using stats through today (8/27) and projecting the rest of the season with FanGraph's ZiPS (ROS). Each batting outcome was given a percentage chance and it was assumed that each player would have a fixed number of PAs for the rest of the season. I used the top 5 each each stat to be his competitors.
According to this, he has a 63.53% chance of winning the SSTC.
Listed below are the 11 players I simulated the rest of the season for and how many times they led the league in each category. It turns out that Miguel Cabrera won it 19 times out of 10,000.

Player BA OBP SLG SSTC
Ben Zobrist 0 28 77 0
Bobby Abreu 0 5 0 0
Chone Figgins 0 7 0 0
Derek Jeter 10 4 0 0
Ichiro Suzuki 1658 0 0 0
Jason Bartlett 78 0 0 0
Joe Mauer 8135 9490 7299 6353
Justin Morneau 0 0 286 0
Kendry Morales 0 0 307 0
Kevin Youkilis 0 427 239 0
Miguel Cabrera 120 39 1795 19

kenfunck
8/27
Excellent! Interesting that Cabrera's chance of winning SLG comes out higher than Ichiro's chance of AVG. But his current power surge has seen him make up 30 points of SLG since the end of Sunday.
bsolow
8/27
Well, I guess I suck at guessing. Fascinating results.
andland
8/27
One reason that he has a harder time winning the SLG is that his rest-of-year projection for SLG is 0.104 lower than his current SLG so ZiPS thinks there is a lot of regression.

If Mauer continues his current pace of .373/.442/.622, he will win it all in 9762 of the simulations. If he exactly performs as projected the rest of the year by ZiPS (no random variation .364/.437/.598), he will win 7612 of them.
wpitcher3
8/26
I think the fact that Williams lost out on the MVP several times while Bonds did not is telling of the times in which the two men played. It seems that MVP voters today may look a little more past surly personalitites.

I also suspect that in the wild card era finishing first is not as crucial to voters as it once was. My impression is that playing on a team that finished well is sufficient--i.e., to be in consideration of an MVP your team has to be in contention late into the season. Sammy Sosa essentially won the 1998 MVP on the basis of the Cubs winning the wild card.

Of course, these are just my impressions. Anyone else feel (or have evidence) that there is a difference in voters' attitudes these days?

Lastly, I find it very interesting (and somewhat pleasing, as a fan) that Ted Williams' legacy has exceeded that of his peers (Mantle and DiMaggio stick out in my mind) who were viewed more positively in their playing days.
havybeaks
8/26
Awesome article! I think the message is also clear that to many voters, MVP = MVY, most valuable Yankee.

During a FOX broadcast of a recent NY-BOS game I had to suffer the Buck-McCarver Campaign for Jeter Annointment. They even argued that Jeter's hard work in going from bad to average on defense (they actually cited advanced metrics) was more MVP-worthy than Mauer simply being great on defense already. And all those replays of Jeter diving into the stands! Perhaps they forgot that wasn't 2009. Where was the replay of Mauer's 2009 gem?

Sorry to vent to the choir here, but Mauer's season makes my jaw drop every time I see what he's doing. Plus, he has better sideburns than Jeter. :)
tkniker
8/26
In your chart, it seems that in the years that the SSTC did win, his team had to finish second.

Guess that means the Twins will need to overtake the ChiSox.
WaldoInSC
8/27
Actually, Jeter didn't dive into the stands. If you view that video carefully, you'll see that Jeter caught the ball on the field and took two steps before vaulting (by his own admission) into the seats in the hope that seated fans would catch him.

But that inconvenient truth undermines the more compelling narrative that has become conventional ignorance and hero worship. Seems to me that a surefire Hall of Famer doesn't need his reputation burnished beyond reality.
Arrian
8/27
When was the last time a Yankee won the MVP, dude? ARod did it, and it was actually deserved. Jeter has actually been jobbed once (although I ultimately have to agree that Pedro was jobbed ever worse that year), and has had other MVP-worthy campaigns (although I'd have voted for Mauer over him in '06, and would this year as well). Buck and McCarver are awful - on that I'm sure we can agree. Use the mute button liberally.

If you want to get all pissy about Yankee MVP talk, Teixiera's the guy to focus on. He's got as much of a case as Morneau had in '06, which is to say he shouldn't get more than a few downballot votes.
jslevin
8/26
That 62% figure can't be right. The three categories are not independent, they're highly correlated. If he wins the batting title, the chance he wins all three has got to be close to 100%.
kenfunck
8/26
Absolutely, although even without trying to account for the correlation using the numbers above there's already a 95.5% chance of Mauer winning the SSTC if he wins the batting title. I don't want to support any false precision here -- that 62% number can be best translated as "a really good chance."
wpitcher3
8/26
Indeed, using the % chance of winning the batting title as the minimum gives a SSTC % that is not much higher than the originally calculated 62%. Still a little less than two thirds, which is pretty amazing!
louisma
8/26
Clearly there is a correlation between AVG, OPB, and SLG, and the higher the AVG the higher the other two that was not addressed in the article. However, your last sentence doesn't really change the answer, does it? Since Ken gives Mauer essentially a 100% chance of winning OBP and SLG, his chances of winning the SSTC are essentially his chance of winning AVG, or 62-63%.
arcee555
8/26
This is an interesting article, in that it confirms the writers vote for the player that gets the most hype, but often ignore the player that had the best season. Whether Mauer actually wins the SSTC isnt really significant to the argument that he is having the best season.
hotstatrat
8/26
Sorry to nit-pick on another terrific article for the most part, but Frank Robinson's nickname was F. Robby, not just Robby, so as to distinguish him from his team-mate Brooks Robinson aka B. Robby. I suppose these guys were fore-runners for A-Rod and I-Rod.
jlebeck66
8/27
I see your nit-pick, and raise you one... Frank & Brooks Robinson weren't teammates until Frank's 11th season in the bigs. My guess was he was nicknamed just Robby long before anyone called him F. Robby.
blcartwright
8/26
of the eight who didn't win the MVP, five were Ted Williams and two played in Coors Field?
hotstatrat
8/27
Yes, they all either played in Fenway or Coors, so I guess Mauer is safe.
offbase99
8/27
Seeing that no catcher has ever won the SSTC, I wondered how many had ever come close. Unsurprisingly, it's Mike Piazza, twice. In 1995, Piazza finished 2nd in AVG, 6th in OBP, and 3rd in SLG. In 1997, Piazza turned in the all-time best SSTC season by a catcher: 3rd in AVG, 3rd in OBP, 2nd in SLG. He lost the MVP that season to Larry Walker.

After that the next best contenders are Chris Hoiles in 1993 (11th/4th/4th) and Carlton Fisk's rookie year in 1972 (8th/7th/2nd). Hoiles finished 15th in the MVP balloting (!), while Fisk won the Rookie of the Year and finished 4th in the MVP race. Don't ask me how he finished behind Joe Rudi.

Johnny Bench never hit for enough average to be a serious SSTC contender, in case you're wondering.