This week, we’re going to run a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Mike Trout for AL MVP.

Mike Trout leads the American League in every major calculation of WAR: Baseball Prospectus’ version, Baseball-Reference’s version and our very own version right here at good ol’ FanGraphs. This unsurprising fact is true because the guy is so damn good at every aspect of baseball. He gets on base. He hits for power. He’s a shockingly productive base-runner. The only area in which he lags a bit is in defensive value, but his offense puts him so far above the competition that no one can surpass Mike Trout’s overall production on the field right now.

That said, let me tell you why Mike Trout isn’t the Most Valuable Player in the American League.

It’s not an easy argument to make. Sure, numbers can be manipulated but not to a degree that allows a straight-up objective argument for any American League player being better than Trout. Comparable? Perhaps. But better? That argument doesn’t exist. We’re here at FanGraphs because we like numbers and objective truths — and all of those indicators point to Mike Trout as the best player in the American League this season. But… I can’t believe I’m about to write these words in this cliché order… let’s talk about the meaning of the word valuable. I think there’s a remarkably valid interpretation of that word which makes this year’s most deserving AL Most Valuable Player candidate a diminutive second baseman from Houston.

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As things stand today, September 2nd, there is a two-way tie between the Orioles and Tigers for the second Wild Card spot in the American League. The Orioles, whether due to the phenomenal exploits of their closer or their inability to convince projection systems of their success, have been the focus of much discussion. It strikes me, though, that the Tigers are flying a bit under the radar. Their best players are guys we’ve talked about for years like Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, and Victor Martinez. Even J.D. Martinez’s success is starting to become yesterday’s news. Outside of the success of Michael Fulmer and Justin Verlander’s resurgence, the Tigers have suffered from being a bit boring, whether that’s fair or not.

They haven’t needed to go on a massive run to get themselves this close to playoff position, as their playoff odds have hovered around 25% for the majority of the second half and topped out at 60% in the start of August. Their current position on the very edge of playoff contention, however, is thanks in part to an 8-2 run over the last week and a half. Some of their key offensive forces — such as Cabrera and the Martinez not-brothers — have been thoroughly predictable over this stretch, but one player who stands out as being somewhat surprisingly good and productive of late is the man in the midst of a disappointing first year of a nine-figure contract: Justin Upton.

Over the past three weeks or so, Upton has been the epitome of a streaky player. From August 9th to August 18th, he took 32 plate appearances and recorded just one hit, giving him a -87 wRC+ — which is evidently a real number a hitter can post over an extended stretch. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn Upton got a day off on August 19th — a -87 wRC+ tends to inspire managers to give a guy some rest — but since his return on August 20th, he’s been an absolute monster at the plate for the Tigers. In those 46 plate appearances, he’s hit three home runs and posted a tremendous 225 wRC+. Yeah, that’ll do. If the Tigers can get the most recent version of Upton to sustain this late-season breakout, it would be a massive boost to their playoff aspirations. Is there any evidence that this mini-breakout is part of a larger trend toward a more productive Upton?

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The Kansas City Royals had won 13 of 15 games entering play on Tuesday only to lose their last two games in one-run, extra-inning fashion to the Yankees. They are now three games back in the Wild Card race and trailing five other teams in competition for two spots. Two weeks ago our playoff odds gave them a less than 1% chance of making the playoffs — and, two days ago, those odds were 9.4% — but after last night’s loss, they’ve fallen back down to 4.7%. Have the Royals really pulled themselves back into contention or has their late-season surge been for naught? They’ve proven projection systems wrong many times before and it’s possible the Royals are preparing for a magical run in September, but it’s undeniable that their path to the playoffs is not an easy one.

What strikes me most about the Royals’ recent run of success is that it’s come largely on the strength of what has been considered the team’s biggest weakness: starting pitching. Over the past 30 days, only the Cubs and Red Sox have posted a lower starters’ ERA than the Royals’ 3.42. Add in the bullpens and the Royals have recorded a 2.77 team ERA in the past 30 days, a figure which narrowly trails the Cubs’ 2.75 team ERA and is head and shoulders above the third-best team ERA over that stretch – the Pirates’ 3.41 mark. Meanwhile, their offense has posted a team wRC+ of 84 during that same stretch which is 26th worst in the majors and just a smidge ahead of the flailing Phillies offense (85 wRC+).

Inasmuch as the Royals have climbed back into contention, they’ve done it on the strength of pitching, which means it’s time to take a look at one of the key pieces in this resurgence, their much-mocked free-agent acquisition and current ace: Ian Kennedy.

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We are currently in the 20th year of regular-season interleague play. I’m not sure exactly how many repetitions it takes for an event to transition from exciting novelty to mundane part of the schedule, but somewhere along the way interleague play has done just that. We now accept that this is a world where things as bizarre as Marlins/Mariners series will occur from time to time because it’s become a part of the routine. However, on occasion something happens to remind us why interleague play has any value. It doesn’t happen often, but it did happen last night, when interleague play set the stage for Yu Darvish to step to the plate and hit the first home run of his professional career.

It wasn’t the first home run hit by an American League pitcher this season — that honor belongs to Anthony Ranaudo — but, with all due respect to Ranaudo, it was the first by a pitcher of Darvish’s caliber in a long time. Since the debut of interleague play in 1997, there have been 21 American League pitcher home runs, from Bobby Witt’s on 6/30/97 to Darvish’s last night. As you would expect, the number of top-tier pitchers on that list after Darvish is small: Mark Buehrle, Zack Greinke, Josh Beckett (twice), and CC Sabathia (twice). You can include post-peak Doc Gooden if you’re so inclined, and then, of course, there’s Felix Hernandez, who hit that beautiful grand slam off Johan Santana at Shea Stadium back in 2008.

It’s such a rare feat that there are still four American League teams – Oakland, Los Angeles, New York, and Minnesota — which have yet to record their first pitcher home run in the DH era. Given that rarity and the particular absurdity of how it all played out last night, it’s worth taking a look at Darvish’s night at the plate.

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I want to share a leaderboard with you that I can’t stop thinking about. These are the top-five National League first basemen in the second half by wRC+:

I cannot fathom a more perfect depiction of the frustratingly beautiful juxtaposition of expected/unexpected outcomes which is so integral to this absurd bat-and-ball game we watch each day. It would be easy to pick Votto, Freeman, Goldschmidt and Gonzalez as top offensive performers among National League first basemen. But Ryan Howard?! That Ryan Howard?!

The thing about Howard is that it’s not as though he snuck onto that leaderboard. He has a 191 wRC+ in the second half! Only four other players in all of MLB have a higher wRC+ since the All-Star break: Votto, Gary Sanchez, J.D. Martinez, and Jose Altuve (min. 60 PA).

What’s more, Ryan Howard’s offensive surge is in true old-school Ryan Howard fashion, which is to say he’s hitting the snot out of the ball. Thanks to a remarkable seven home runs in just 66 plate appearances, he’s posted a .403 ISO and .742 slugging percentage. Of the 294 players with 60 or more plate appearances this half, 142 of them — nearly half! — have a lower OPS than Howard’s SLG%.

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There ought to be no shame in a pitcher struggling at Coors Field. Many of the greatest pitchers on the planet have been humbled in that stadium and, last week, Stephen Strasburg became merely the latest among them. Allowing nine runs before being pulled in just the second inning, Strasburg posted what was far and away the worst performance of his career. He’d never previously given up more than seven runs in a game and his game score of 1 was not only his lowest mark ever, but is tied for seventh worst in baseball this season. Ideally, this could be written off as a Coors fluke for one of the game’s best pitchers, but instead it’s served to illuminate the frustrating reality that Strasburg has struggled mightily of late.

Over his last six outings, Strasburg has given up 26 runs in 30.2 innings pitched. Crunch the numbers and you’ll find that works out to a decidedly un-ace-like 7.63 ERA. These six outings have caused his season ERA to rise more than one full run, from 2.51 to 3.59. The good news is that there’s more than a little hope to be found in his peripheral stats. Over this awful stretch, his FIP is a massively more palatable 3.25, largely on the strength of a solid 29.1% strikeout rate and a roughly league-average 7.8% walk rate. It also likely won’t surprise you to learn that he’s posted an inflated .388 BABIP during this rough patch. Unfortunately, this is not to say Strasburg’s swoon has been entirely devoid of red flags.

In mid-June, Strasburg hit the disabled list with a back injury. Considering a back injury was the primary culprit in Strasburg’s first-half struggles last season, this latest DL stint was an unavoidably alarming development. Fortunately, he made a swift return to the mound. Any hopes that he’d escape the performance struggles which plagued him a year ago, however, have been derailed by his recent stretch. Whether those struggles are directly related to the injury is unknowable, but there are observable things about Strasburg which have changed since his return.

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Here’s the good news: the Texas Rangers have the best record in the American League and a seven-game division lead. Here’s the less-good news: our playoff projections give them roughly one-in-10 odds of relinquishing their division lead before the end of the season due, in part, to the worst rest-of-season winning percentage projection of any current first-place team. One of the primary reasons projection systems are down on the Rangers relative to other first-place teams is that they’ve struggled with run prevention this season and a key cause of that struggle has been their difficulty filling out a five-man rotation with healthy, reliable starting pitching. However, the top of their rotation features a stealth Cy Young candidate in a weak field, Cole Hamels, and an ace who is increasingly looking like another Tommy John success story: Yu Darvish.

Since rejoining the rotation for good after the All-Star break, Darvish has been among the best pitchers in the American League on the strength of a 2.70 ERA, 3.32 RA9 and a major-league-leading 28.0-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%). But one of the most encouraging things to see with Darvish is that he’s been able to go deep into games. It wasn’t until his most recent two starts that he crossed the 95-pitch threshold this year, and yet he’s currently riding an active six-game streak of going six innings or more in his starts. Things have been going extraordinarily well of late for Darvish and it’s worth taking a look at what has and hasn’t changed for Darvish and whether or not he’s truly “back.”

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In retrospect, it was inevitable. Monday night, Bartolo Colon did what once looked to be impossible and drew the first walk of his major league career. The all-time leader in plate appearances without drawing a single free pass stepped to the plate in the fourth inning against Diamondbacks pitcher Robbie Ray and seven pitches later the history books were rewritten.

It was a bittersweet moment for me. Seeing a 43-year-old player achieve something on the baseball diamond for the first time is always thrilling, but this achievement also brought an end to one of my favorite streaks. In June, I wrote about Bartolo Colon’s record-setting game in celebration of an accomplishment I’d actively watched develop for months. The problem with records like these, however, is that it takes just one plate appearance to undo everything. Ben Revere had an incredible stretch with zero career home runs… until he didn’t. Bartolo Colon had an incredible stretch with zero career walks… until Monday. One of these days, Matt Albers and Ryan Webb may even draw a save and put an end to their remarkable streaks.

During Colon’s record-setting game — his record-setting plate appearance, to be even more precise – he provided a hint that this record would not be long-lived. The previous (and now current) record holder was Tracy Stallard whose career ended with zero walks in 258 plate appearances. When Colon tied Stallard’s record, not only had he never drawn a walk, he’d worked just six three-ball counts over those 258 plate appearances. So, naturally, in the record-breaking 259th PA, Colon worked a full count.

As it turns out, the impeccably timed three-ball count wasn’t a mere fluke, but instead was indicative of a significant shift in Colon’s approach at the plate. In his first two seasons with the Mets, Colon posted a 51.6 Swing% which was the 95th highest among 546 batters with 130+ plate appearances. This season, his Swing% has plummeted to 41.2% which ranks 446th among 517 batters with 40+ plate appearances. Although his Contact% has also dropped from a bad 63.5% in his first two seasons to an atrocious 48.5% this year, going from a guy who swung too much and rarely made contact to a guy who swung rarely and hardly ever made contact was enough to set up the inevitability of a base on balls.

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With 117 games in the books, the Miami Marlins are one measly half-game out of wild card position. Considering they’re just five games over .500 and four teams are within 2 1/2 games of that final wild card spot, I wouldn’t exactly go printing Marlins playoff tickets yet, but it’s impossible to deny that the theoretical scenario in which they reach the postseason is becoming increasingly possible. As a result, they are now reasonably in a position where it’s in their best interest to make decisions over the next 45 games that best give their current team a chance to win. Yesterday’s announcement that Giancarlo Stanton’s season is over naturally raised the following question: “Who should the Marlins add to help replace that production?” The initial rumored answer is the hilariously unsatisfying solution of newly minted free agent, Alex Rodriguez. On a visceral, gut level, this is a horrendous idea, but let’s move beyond that immediate reaction and take stock of the pros and the cons of this pairing.
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If you’re searching for a compelling National League division race, the only place to turn is the west coast. With the Nationals currently 7-1/2 games up on the second place Marlins and the Cubs sporting an even wider 13-game lead on the Cardinals, the one game separating the Giants and Dodgers at the top of the western division makes it the only intriguing race going. Given that the Dodgers are arguably the favorites to win the division and inarguably a playoff contender, I have what should be an easy question: Which five pitchers are currently in the Dodgers rotation?

Don’t wrack your brain too hard; it’s a trick question. There are the two pitchers who have been healthy all season, Kenta Maeda and Scott Kazmir, and then there’s Brandon McCarthy who returned to the rotation in July from his Tommy John Surgery. Beyond that it gets increasingly murky.
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