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I’ll say it up front; the headline you just read is a little bit of a trick. This post is about Hunter Pence perhaps being more valuable this year than most of us realized, but because I have an NL MVP ballot this year, I can’t get too deep into my personal opinion of where Pence belongs on the ballot. This isn’t me explaining why Pence should rank at some particular position in the final MVP tally; it’s me using Hunter Pence to talk about one primary way where I think the stats that are normally used to determine MVPs might miss some real value, and that goes for WAR as well.

By either traditional or even normal advanced metrics, Pence doesn’t have much of a case. He’s hitting .290 with 17 HRs and 72 RBIs as a corner outfielder, which isn’t going to fly in a season where Giancarlo Stanton hit twice as many bombs and has driven in an extra 30 runs. And it’s not like the more sabermetric numbers help his case that much either; Pence has a .345 OBP and .463 SLG, so he ranks 22nd in the NL in OPS, one spot behind Seth Smith. Yeah.

Even adjusting for park factors only gets Pence’s wRC+ up to a tie for 18th in the NL, in the same range as Michael Morse, Neil Walker, and Starling Marte. You probably won’t see too many people arguing for those guys as MVP candidates, and rightfully so, and these are Pence’s peers even by our most often cited hitting metric. So, why am I writing about Hunter Pence and the MVP?

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Ken Rosenthal has an NL MVP vote this year, and the other day, he wrote about his thought process in regards to pitchers winning the award. He’d prefer to vote for a position player, but isn’t entirely against pitchers-as-MVPs, and he noted that a dominant starter who works deep into games doesn’t just affect the team on the day they pitch, as is commonly cited. Quoting from his column:

The one pro-Kershaw argument I do like – the one I recall making for Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 – is that a dominant starting pitcher affects three games out of five. Kershaw averages more than 7 1/3 innings per start. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly can empty his bullpen the day before Kershaw pitches and manage a fully rested group the day after.

This does seem to be a potentially real benefit created by Kershaw that is not being accounted for anywhere in his own stat-line. While there is a lot of talk about players “making their teammates better”, this would be one actual place where it could exist, with a starting pitcher allowing his manager to reallocate his bullpen usage to the days around Kershaw, increasing their chances of winning on those days as well. This is the kind of thing that we wouldn’t capture by just looking at Kershaw’s performance.

But is it true? Rob Neyer was smart enough to realize that we should be able to find some data to test this theory, and so I bugged Jeff Zimmerman about it, and he was nice enough to query out the Dodgers’ bullpen usage on days before and after Kershaw pitched this season. Here are the results.

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Who is the best team in baseball right now? There are a handful of ways one could attempt to answer this question.

The Angels currently have the best record at 94-57, so they’re a natural pick, and maybe the best selection, as they also lead the majors in both run differential and expected record by BaseRuns, both measures which attempt to strip some luck out of a team’s results. But on the other hand, the Angels were excellent for most of the year in part due to the excellent pitching of Garrett Richards, who is now injured and won’t pitch again this year.

Rob did a nice job of showing that one player does not make or break a team, but good players do matter to some degree, and the Angels are a worse team without Richards than they were with him. His loss doesn’t cut out their legs, but it does make them less likely to keep winning at this same pace going forward, and this question asks us to care more about the future than the past.

So maybe this isn’t such an open-and-shut case. Let’s evaluate a few of the top contenders, and look at their claim to the Best Team in Baseball title.

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Here at FanGraphs, we spend a decent amount of time talking about ways to think about valuing players and their performance. These kinds of discussions naturally lead themselves to conversations about various postseason awards, and with the rise of prominence of WAR, the role of newer metrics in determining things like the Most Valuable Player or Cy Young Award in each league. And so we end up writing a lot of words about player value in the context of trying to define awards that were created by other entities, and sometimes, arguing about the meaning of the name of the award rather than the performances of the players on the field.

So this year, we’ve decided that perhaps it is time that we just have our own award, so we can define the award in a way that makes sense to us, and to give us a chance to honor the the single player that we felt deserved to be recognized in a given year, regardless of which position he plays or which league he is in. To that end, we’ve decided to create the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, which we will give out for the first time this season.

The criteria for the award will be rather simple: which player, through his on-the-field performance, most deserves to be recognized for his outstanding play within the given season? It is an attempt to honor outstanding performances, and to consider the relative merit of all players who contributed within that season, regardless of position or quality of his teammates.

Certainly, we recognize that we are not the first organization to create their own Player of the Year Award, as the Sporting News, Baseball America, and the MLB Player’s Association all have similar awards, and ESPN gives out an ESPY award for “Best MLB Player” every year. However, as we are a baseball-only site, and one that focuses heavily on attempting to quantify player value, we think it is likely that we may come to different conclusions than other organizations, and we would rather spend our time honoring players we think are worthy rather than trying to convince other organizations to adopt our methodology for their award. This does not mean we think our award is better or more important than other awards — including the awards voted on by members of the BBWAA, which we remain a part of and will continue to vote on when asked — but that we think there’s some value in having an award that is distinctly ours.

The FanGraphs Player of the Year Award will be voted on by members of the FanGraphs staff. This year, the 11 voting members are as follows.

Tony Blengino
Dave Cameron
Carson Cistulli
August Fagerstrom
David Laurila
Kiley McDaniel
Mike Petriello
Eno Sarris
Jeff Sullivan
Paul Swydan
Wendy Thurm

Each member will be casting a ballot with 10 names ranked in sequential order as well as a grade for that player’s season — in order to capture information about the voter’s opinion of relative performance beyond just what a simple list vote can offer — and both the ranking and the grade will be used to calculate the final order. And no, to answer the obvious question, the order and the grade will not simply be based on a player’s Wins Above Replacement. All the ballots will be made public and we will attempt to be as thorough and transparent as possible about the calculations. We will vote on the award at the conclusion of the regular season, and announce the first annual FanGraphs Player of the Year Award winner on Monday, October 20th, the day between the end of the League Championship Series and the start of the World Series.

In addition, we will run a crowdsourced ballot on the day after the regular season ends, and announce the results of the FanGraphs Readers Player of the Year selection as well.

Over the next month, our writers will be encouraged to write articles detailing the way they plan to approach their ballot, and we will attempt to make it quite clear why each voter decided on their final ballot. We also fully encourage educated lobbying, so if you would like to make a strong case for your favorite candidate, the Community Blog is a great place to make your arguments heard. If the piece is compelling, we will publish it, and we will take your points into account when deciding how to vote.

So, don’t be shy in letting us know who you think the FanGraphs Player of the Year should be. There are a number of players having excellent seasons, but only one will be honored as the most outstanding player of 2014 as evaluated by a collection of baseball nerds.

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With the Marlins hanging around the periphery of the Wild Card race, there’s a strong chance that Giancarlo Stanton is going to win the NL MVP award. He’s the classic traditional candidate, leading the league in home runs and runs batted in, and the Marlins small gap from the Wild Card leaders will allow people to talk themselves into his performance having come in games that mattered. With all of the other top candidates requiring the rejection of some long held ideal, Stanton looks like a pretty easy choice for someone who likes the way that MVPs have traditionally been selected.

This may actually be bad news for the Marlins, however. An MVP trophy would be nice recognition for the franchise’s best player, but it would also increase his asking price in arbitration, and Stanton is already in a position where he has significant leverage. The Marlins have thus far eschewed trade requests for their right fielder, hopeful that they can convince him to sign a long-term deal to stay in Miami, but an MVP trophy might make a tough road even more difficult. Let’s look at the kinds of numbers Stanton may very well ask for to pass up the chance to hit free agency after the 2016 season.

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Back at the end of July, there was one overarching narrative: the Tigers and A’s engaging in an arms race to try and get an advantage for their inevitable October match-up. On the day the Tigers acquired David Price and the A’s acquired Jon Lester, Oakland had the best record in baseball, while Detroit had a comfortable four game lead in the AL Central; since adding their respective aces, both have surrounded their divisional leads, with the A’s falling so far behind the Angels that their chances of winning the AL West now stand a fraction of one percent.

Toss in the quickly fading Milwaukee Brewers — 60-49 on July 31st, 14-22 since — and we have three strong first half contenders limping to the finish line. Like the A’s, the Brewers should basically punt any hopes they still hold about a division title, and are now hoping entirely for a surge that will put them back in the Wild Card race. But even if the A’s, Tigers, and Brewers manage to right their ships, should they really be optimistic about their chances in October? After all, they’ve spent the better part of the last few months playing lousy baseball, and at some point, doesn’t a second half slump become an indicator of underlying problems that would derail a playoff run even if the team managed to get to the postseason?

In a word: no.

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