On Friday, I struck a cautionary note about the nature of progress in voting. It's a great, good, and happy thing, of course, but one vote is just that. It was a lone data point, not a trend, and certainly not evidence of some massive shift in the electorate, either generationally or as a reflection of the broader use and applied knowledge of the better pitching metrics most of you reading this are already aware of. Admittedly, a lot of that was rooted in my natural capacity to nag and counterpunch—I'm often a scrupulous bore when it comes to pointing out silver linings or lone storm clouds. It's a way to make conversation, after all.
Playing a cautionary note is all well and good, but little did I anticipate the need for a cautionary howitzer to blaze away at the suggestion that progress would be linear, let alone universal. Because with Monday's stupefying announcement of Joey Votto's landslide victory in the voting for National League Most Valuable Player, what else is there to say, but that progress happens one vote at a time?
I do not say this to diminish Votto's season, which was superb. Beyond leading the league in OBP and SLG and finishing second in batting average, he posted the highest True Average in the game (.350), and narrowly trailed the two-time defending MVP, Albert Pujols, in VORP, 81.8-78.2. That was a function of playing time, of course, as Pujols notched another 50 plate appearances while finishing behind Votto with a .344 TAv. And those extra PAs helped make sure that Pujols led in homers, and Pujols' teammates contributed to his winning the RBI title by providing him with 30 more at-bats with runners on base than Votto got with the Reds. In terms of the offense they created, it's a fairly narrow argument—Votto was marginally better in his at-bats, Pujols got more of them because he started 12 more games. So, fair enough, it's a debatable argument over the virtues of rates versus counting stats, and narrow enough that reasonable people can agree to disagree.
Of course, that's not all either man brings to the table. Pujols is the best defender at first base of his generation, at a time when the game isn't overstocked with Dick Stuart types. While BIS has Pujols and Votto roughly even in the field in Runs Saved, Pujols comes out ahead in terms of plays made; the system evaluates Pujols' 2010 as much less effective in the field than he was in his MVP seasons. Fair enough, switch over to Colin Wyers' nFRAA, and Pujols' 2010 ranks behind his 2008 and 2009 seasons, but that's in part because those were the two best fielding seasons by any first baseman in the last three years; his 2010 ranks sixth overall, better than every season Votto has had at first. Evaluations from Total Zone generally concur: Pujols was a lot better in the field in '08 and '09, and slightly better in '10.
Taken broadly, offense and defense together, and you wind up with a fairly narrow gap between the two best position players in the league. A total-value counting metric like WARP2 probably overstates the difference in giving Pujols a decisive advantage, 8.9-7.7. It's a fairly narrow choice. There's an honorable argument to make on behalf of Roy Halladay and Adam Wainwright, that they deserved consideration as well, since both pitchers outpointed Pujols and Votto in WARP, but there's a large body of opinion that pitchers already have their own award, and we gave that hardware out last week.
So naturally, with a choice between two evenly-matched candidacies, Votto got 31 of 32 first-place votes.
You can ascribe all sorts of rationales to this. Votto's team won the division that Pujols' team was in, and that was an upset outcome. Add in that Votto had his best season, while Pujols had what might have merely been his fifth-best in a 10-season romp that might already make him the best first baseman in big-league history. Via WARP2, Pujols' 2008 and 2009 performances rank among the 25 best seasons ever in NL history. His 2010 doesn't even crack the top 100, rating a mere 166th. Sheesh, what a bum. For completeness' sake, Votto was 387th, but he was a hero on an underdog, not a demi-god flirting with mortality.
Votto was an entirely credible victor over Pujols, just not in this sort of landslide. While it's entirely possible that 31 of 32 electors could all independently come to the same conclusion, and prefer Votto's campaign to Pujols—a position I might well have taken myself with a few days' consideration—the sad conclusion there for many to draw from the wisdom of this particular crowd of 31 is that framing these stories potentially played a too-large role. In the abstract, you would have expected a broader distribution from an electorate judging Pujols strictly in direct comparison to Votto.
Instead, this outcome suggests that Pujols was being penalized for what he had been before and did not then do yet again, and not judged strictly on what he had done just this past year with reference to what everyone else did in this “year of the pitcher.” So he handily won 21 second-place votes beyond the one brave ballot from Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with his name first, and just a little bit ahead of the Rockies' Carlos Gonzalez on points. CarGo won the batting title and led the league in total bases and hits, which is nice. Per WARP, he rated behind Votto and Pujols, and Matt Holliday and Adrian Gonzalez, and Jay Bruce and Jayson Werth and Ryan Braun, not to mention his own teammate, Troy Tulowitzki. Like Preston Wilson or even Dante Bichette before him, Gonzalez's ability to make hard contact at altitude and derive an outsized individual benefit from what Denver does to breaking stuff is all well and good; his strikeout rate drops steeply at home, and he gets extra opportunities to do damage in Coors Field. That's a good thing, and he's a very gifted outfielder, but also who nevertheless hit just .289/.322/.453 in normal offensive environments. He nevertheless got mistaken for one of the three best position players in the league in 2011.
Working down the ballot, it's nice that Adrian Gonzalez wound up fourth and Tulo fifth—squint a bit, and maybe you can see the flip side of the argument about park effects, that the same voters who put a park-inflated CarGo third could make room for simultaneously park-handicapped A-Gonz on their ballots. It's also noteworthy that Halladay's superb campaign got him onto 26 ballots. But then there are still things like Ryan Howard getting second-, third-, and fourth-place votes, when he wasn't even the fourth-best first baseman in his league; if Pujols was getting punished for not being divine, how do a few voters in the very same electorate manage to completely overlook Howard putting up his worst full season?
Perhaps Votto's one-sided win is coincidental, and perhaps it doesn't have anything to do with Pujols' previously set standards of performance. Maybe CarGo's relatively rare set of skills deserves this much due. We can call the final outcome just, certainly, but whatever you call it, one thing the outcome of the NL MVP vote is not is further evidence of progress.
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The writers, and by extension the general baseball public, are not ready to accept advanced stats. What they are willing to do is to re-evaluate the traditional stats.
Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young not because voters were looking at advanced stats. He won because voters were willing to put ERA, K's, and IP above Wins.
By the way, Votto hit .349/.452/.641 on the ROAD, with nearly identical home/road splits for HRs and RBIs. That is the kind of excellence and consistency for a division winner that is fully deserving of the MVP. Unlike you, Christina, I salute the voters on the landslide vote. Sometimes you have to see the forest for the trees.
If context is fine for the MVP award, but not the Cy Young, does this mean you'd have CC ahead of Felix on your MVP ballot, but not your Cy Young?
Ultimately, the vote between Votto and Pujols may have come down to irrational predilection, but at worst, I see this is non-progress, as opposed to a step back. Shouldn't saberers be stoked by the fact that arguably the two best players in the NL finished first and second?
Also, Howard's votes do indeed stand out as peculiar. He was named on only 8 ballots, but an average position of 4.75. If you order the players by number of ballots and plot the average position (or score), you get a nice fairly linear relationship with two exceptions: Howard, and Ubaldo's lone 4th place vote.
You want Pujols to be worth an additional 5 wins so that his team would contend for a playoff spot before he is worthy of an MVP vote?? All else being equal, it would have required Pujols to put up the best season by a player in over 100 years (arguably ever) just for the Cards to have forced a 163rd game against the Reds.
He explicitly denies the use of wins as even remotely credible, but the team you play for is OK. However, I feel they are both invalid for the exact same reasons.
He also explicitly said he'd prefer the MVP to come from a playoff team, my counter was that for Pujols' team to be a playoff team, all else equal, he'd have to have the best player season ever. I think that is an unfair standard to hold over poor Albert.
It comes down to which of the characteristics of the problem you're holding constant and which you're varying. He's saying fix the level of performance as is, then consider the context. You're saying to vary the level of performance in order to compare them in similar contexts. That's not the same argument, i.e. when you say "all else equal," you're not actually holding all else equal.
Pujols/Votto outcome is not surprising or in my opinion indicative of an underinformed electorate. The Ryan Howard voters and perhaps the CarGo voters are much scarier to me. I also find it a little unnerving at how poorly Halladay performed. He was the best player on a playoff team. I think it's time for the writers to consider pitchers again for the award.
If two players have similar VORP, there are plenty of things left to consider about the individual without resorting to "well, who had a better supporting cast?" their performances in clutch situations, pitchers they faced, hell even the dreaded unquantifiable intangibles like clubhouse personality and leadership and whatnot. They might not be repeatable skills or their impact may be overblown, but at least they can be credited solely to the guy being considered for the vote.
Faced with two very similar candidates, voters nearly unanimously chose some combination of two biases: which guy's team made the playoffs, and which guy's mantelpiece isn't already full.
As a tiebreaker, I just don't see that as a big deal.
If the Cardinals had also made the playoffs, eliminating the first bias, my guess is that Votto still wins based on the second bias but it's somewhat closer.
Now if Christina's point is that based on the unanimity of the vote, Votto may well have bested Pujols even if there was a very clear case that Pujols had a better season -- I can't really argue that, could be.
Human bias is to reward the candidate 1. And since all else was (roughly) equal, there's really nothing wrong with that. Groupthink voting aside.
I would probably end up arguing the opposite way on the second question anyway. If one can't conclusively decide which of two players is really the most valuable for their services this season, then the player with the better history ought to get the nod.
Her own conclusion was: "Taken broadly, offense and defense together, and you wind up with a fairly narrow gap between the two best position players in the league."
"Taken broadly" is all you can really ask of the writers -- when you start getting too granular, especially as regards defense, there's just not enough certainty to ascribe too much value to those differences. (If they had identical batting lines but Pujols played a very good third base while Votto played an okay 1B, fine, I think it's reasonable to expect the writers to credit that.)
I continue to think that Christina was absolutely fine with the result of Votto winning, but that she would have preferred the electorate to gnash and figure and argue their way to a close result rather than seeming to do a knee-jerk default to the guy whose team made the playoffs.
And not that she needs my approval, but I won't fault her for holding out hope for that, any more than I'll blame the writers for going with the "story."
The groupthink of the media (sports and otherwise) can be interesting at times.
If you want to argue against 'team actually wins' counting, than do so.
If you wanna know who led the league in WARP, which I often do, look at the leaderboards. You can even do that on different websites that have different ways of calculating it. But if you want to give an MVP award, which is absolutely contextualized by a baseball season, then you're not worried about shorting Pujols an award he'll undoubtedly win again in the future.
The MVP is a narrative, and while I want that narrative to include an understanding of stats etc., to denounce it because there was a rather obvious and compelling story line as opposed to a rather ho-hum Pujols-did-it-again "actual" outcomes, is not "helping" stats at all.
My guess is that this is because the MVP and the Cy Young Award are commonly viewed as inherently different. The latter is for the best pitcher in the league, but the other is not seen by most people as the "best player" award.
Whether this should be the case is another question, but so long as people have differing views about what we mean by "valuable," it is easy to both hate wins (in the context of an award for the best pitcher, because they don't measure individual achievement) but love guys on playoff teams (in the context of an award that many define as measuring something different than the best individual achievement by a player).
Had the consensus been that Felix and CC or Felix and Price were effectively tied in effectiveness, I have little doubt that the guy with more wins would've gotten the nod. (i.e. pitcher wins would have been the tiebreaker in the same way that the playoffs were in the MVP)
Should the MVP be a narrative?
In practice, it often is a narrative, but that's because those voting on the awards are writers who naturally want the best story to write about. This leads to a self-fulfilling award. But is that really the best way to decide?
What's interesting here isn't that Votto won--it's not an unreasonable result. What's interesting is how essentially everyone with a vote latched onto him, responded to that narrative or created it, taking their part, actively or unconsciously, in completing a compelling story arc.
If there were an everday-player equivalent of the Cy Young I might have a difficult choice between Votto and Pujols. In a vote for MVP, (where pitchers are eligible too), I want players who had an impact on their teams' season. This is not the eight-team American League of the 1950s. It does not take top-to-bottom team talent to contend. If poor Albert is being penalized because the Cardinals couldn't reach that level in 2010, the odds are he will have years in the future where the Cards are winners and he'll get extra credit for it.
Felix over CC for Cy Young. CC over Felix in MVP voting (though I'd put neither in the top 10). In baseball awards, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
CC had the bigger impact on his team's success, and his stats weren't exactly chopped liver, by the way. His team contended and he was a big, if not a major, part of it. That's the MVP. I don't hate pitcher-wins. I loved it when Steve Carlton went 27-10 for the 59-103 1972 Phillies. But I would not have supported him for MVP. I have different standards for the two awards. Obviously some voters do too. I can live with the inconsistency.
I don't hate pitcher-wins. I liked it when Steve Carlton went 27-10 for the 59-103 1972 Phils.
If the voting system had proportional voting, and 5 voted 60% yes, 40% no, and the two voted 0% yes, 100% no, this person would have been denied tenure, on a 300 points for 400 votes against basis.
This same phenomenon probably explains the Votto landslide. With proporotional voting, most voters would probably vote 60% Votto, 40% Pujols, leading to a closer decision. However, these 60/40 Votto voters had to vote Votto #1, leading to the landslide.
This happens all the time in baseball awards.
A perhaps clumsy analogy: Imagine two bags of coins. In one bag you have 19 nickles and 1 dime, $1.05 total. In the other bag you have 19 pennies and 1 quarter, 44 cents total. What is the most valuable coin? If you don't think this analogy applies, then you need to explain why without using vague notions of "leading the team" to this and "having an impact" on that, because it doesn't really address the issue. The nickle bag (please excuse the expression) is worth more overall, but if you replaced that bag's one dime with the other bag's one quarter the nickle bag does even better. What is the purpose of overcomplicating this? If you want a good story, pick up a Dickens novel.
I agree with Joe Lefko. If we have a very close call, let's bring the quality of the player's answers to the press and his SAT scores into it before we start taking one player's crappy second baseman into the mix. It's an individual player award.
I think you've put your finger on the problem here, to mind MVP does not equal best player, value means how a player contributed to a Team which had some level of success, if you have a different definition you'll come to a different answer.
I love stats, and sabermetrics has helped me to understand and enjoy the game more than I did pre-Bill James. But I hope I never "evolve" to the point where I fail to see that each season, each race is a story. Each one amazingly a unique story after all of these seasons. To assign some weight to the "story" isn't a weakness of the MVP vote..it's part of the beauty of it.
I've read Dickens. I'll take the stories that baseball unveils during the course of each season every time.
It certainly makes more sense to me to reward an individual achievement. But unless and until there are rules about the qualifications voters should consider, people are just going to talk past each other based on their different opinions about what the awards should be about.
Criticizing Cy Young voters is much easier. The voters agree that the award should go to the best pitcher, so when they award a pitcher who was clearly not the best, they've failed to correctly apply their own criteria for the award.
But while I'm all for making the argument that the MVP should go to the best player, it is pointless to criticize voters for not selecting the best player when the majority of them don't even believe that being the best is decisive to who wins the MVP award.
Up to __ points:
6 for overall offense (Relative performance -- 6 for best, 5 for next tier, etc.)
2 for winning team (Playoffs = 2, Winning Record = 1)
2 for defense (Notable asset = 2, Not a negative = 1)
1 for "clutch" offense (yes/no)
1 for narrative elements such as novelty (yes/no)
In this James-esque model, Votto gets 11/12 (6/2/1/1/1) whereas Pujols gets 10 (6/1/2/1/0). At the top end, there's not a whole lot of grey area. Votto has the slight, but clear edge. Easy decision.
Obviously that's not the exact model, but I bet it's functionally close to that. Short of actually doing the math (and we know the writers aren't doing math) t comes down to some sort of mental calculus. I don't think they spell it out quite this clearly, but it's a handful of 5 or 6 considerations with a very simple scale that get added up.
So it's not that it was really close and given the wide array of methods used it should have looked like a virtual coin flip. It's that writers generally care about the same few things and all "did the math" pretty much the same way, the simplest version being that both guys were equally productive but Votto led his team to the playoffs.
Sure, the novelty element most likely plays a role here too, but I think that's primarily a tie-breaker and the writers simply didn't see this as a tie needing to be broken.
Either we are voting on an individual award or we're not. Which is it?
I'm sure someone has already figured this out or that I could dig it up somewhere, but I think it would make for an interesting article. And I'm just guessing, but could that guy be Adrian Gonzalez? Pujols is probably close, but he has Holliday for a teammate. And if we included pitchers, this would also be pretty interesting.
That sort of highlights the silliness of giving a player award based on team performance, doesn't it?
Don't get me wrong, I find that analysis interesting, but at the end of the day, the only logically coherent way to do is to frame it as "what player produced the most", isolated from the performance of his teammates.
The Cardinals don't win the division without Pujols either. They didn't win it with Pujols, actually. They didn't win it, and Pujols wasn't the reason. The reason was that they had too many other sucky players.
Look, I see the strawman you're trying to put together here, and I appreciate the effort, but again you're missing the point. No one said there aren't stories in a baseball season, and no one said they didn't like those stories. I didn't say it, and Joe Lefko didn't say it. I relish those great stories, year in and year out, but I take them as they come. There is no need to squeeze an extra story out of something if it isn't there.
When two great players have great seasons, I think reasonable people can disagree as to whom should win the MVP award, especially when the value of those players, looked at from different angles and examined closely, appears to be very close. Our metrics are better every year, but they’ll never be perfect. If you have reason to believe that Player A did something specific in the clubhouse, in terms or guiding young players or legitimately lifting his team up so that the others were made to play better, great. Present it as evidence and show me that Player B either failed or didn't try to do it.
Team wins, by and large, don't tell us that, no matter how much we want to romanticize baseball. Team wins are basically the product of having a good squad made up of individual players who are working together to win. If you believe that Player A is so awe inspiring to his teammates that, through his sheer countenance and the strength of his aura, made the rest of his team play better baseball, then great, give him the credit for his team being better than Player B's, but be prepared to show some evidence for it. It’s been my experience that most of that sort of talk is nonsense, and I'd be willing to bet that, in most circumstances, the effect is either too small or elusive to measure, or Player B is also doing the same thing for his team because he’s also a professional doing his best to win. The difference probably isn't the players at that point, it's the fact that Player B's team's shortstop has an OPS+ of 57, and their 4th and 5th starters are Kyle Lohse and Jeff Suppan. You'll notice that, should the Reds fail to make it next year, it's much more likely to be because some player like Rolen went down or the bullpen fell apart or whatever, and not because Joey Votto suddenly failed to possess the special essence that makes ball teams win division titles.
"I love stats, and sabermetrics has helped me to understand and enjoy the game more than I did pre-Bill James. But I hope I never "evolve" to the point where I fail to see that each season, each race is a story. Each one amazingly a unique story after all of these seasons. To assign some weight to the "story" isn't a weakness of the MVP vote..it's part of the beauty of it."
In your opinion. See, there is nothing in the BBWAA instructions about that. To be fair, the original instructions did say 'There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means...,' but they also said, 'The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier....actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense.' The implication is pretty clear.
"I've read Dickens. I'll take the stories that baseball unveils during the course of each season every time."
I wish I could be soulful about baseball, too. Instead...sigh...I'm mired in this cold, harsh, torpid world of baseball as numbers within a computer simulation. Someone get me outta here! It’s like the movie Tron!
Let me ask you and any other where-the-team-finishes-matters-a-lot-for-MVP proponents something: Is it essential that the MVP come from a division-winning team? If so, does it still matter if the division winner is 84-78, while the guy with the better numbers was on a team that went 86-76 but finished second in a better division (perhaps behind a team that had a great story, if not any truly exceptional characters)?
If the MVP should but doesn’t absolutely have to come from a division winner, what if a player hits .360/.480/.700 for a team that goes 72-90 because it has no pitching? What kind of season does it take for a player on a losing team to tip the scales so that you are suddenly ready to consider him? In short, where and how do you draw your line?
Is it an individual award or not? It seems to me that we have plenty of awards for teams. Winning is the ultimate goal in baseball, and everyone knows it, even us eggheads who hate stories. That's what the game is about. That being said, if you're going to hand out individual awards and inscribe individual players' names on it, I still fail to see how it should be based on team performance.
For the record, I don't care that much whether it was Votto or Pujols. It was a relatively close call, and I probably would have gone with Albert, but Votto seems like a fine choice. That's not what I'm arguing against here.
I admit that we can't find a 100% accurate objective standard for the award, but what you're talking about now would introduce an absurd amount of off-the-cuff, subjective elements, and it could be wildly different from voter to voter. By your definition, what would "somewhat close" even mean? What is the point of bothering to use any careful statistics like WARP or VORP or Win Shares or anything like that?
What you're missing here is that, ultimately, you are not suggesting we give it to the guy who had the biggest impact on his team, I am. So an 8-win player should get it if he leads his team to a 91-71 record and a Wild Card berth, but a 10-win player who drags an otherwise dreadful squad to an 82-80 record hasn't earned it? Why? You still haven't even come close to answering that question. No one has.
The 10-win player had a bigger impact on his team. If by "impact" you mean "value as I subjectively apply it, based on the situation and varying from season to season", fine. Jsut admit that there is nothing even remotely rigorous or logical about that, and we'll move on.
So, to me, in an otherwise very close MVP race, I am very comfortable with the tiebreaker going to the guy who played for the division winner. (This is especially true here since both players are in the same division.) If the players themselves place such a high value on winning, I think it is fair for the voters to consider it, too.
Joey Votto winning the 2010 MVP over Albert Pujols is no travesty, folks. Andre Dawson (2.7 WARP for the last place Cubs) beating Ozzie Smith (7.1 WARP for the first place Cardinals, in the same division) in 1987 definitely was.
Side Note I wonder if the guy that voted Pujols 5th also voted Cargo 6th, and Adrian Gonzo 7th, and the Ryan Howard 2nd. hahaha
As to Votto/Pujols, this reminds me of a few years back, when Karl Malone won the MVP over Michael Jordan. I think certain players ( MJ, Albert ) are so dominant that, when the voters can, as some have argued, follow a narrative in a different direction, they'll jump at it. Writers get just as bored with things as anything else. I'm not justifying it, just saying that this seems like a plausible explanation. That being said, I have no problem at all with Votto winning the MVP, although he does put up big numbers in a homerun haven. But, since it's not in Colorado, that makes it entirely legitimate.