Bobby Witt Jr. and the Off-Peak MVP Season

Bobby Witt Jr. is having a down year. He’s running his worst batting line in three seasons. He’s in danger of missing the 20-homer threshold for the first time in his career. A lower back injury in July will also limit him to a career low in games played. Put it together, and Witt is on pace to put up his the lowest WAR total since his 5.9-win 2023 campaign. Oh, and he also grabbed hold of the American League lead in WAR back in July and still hasn’t relinquished it. A down year by Bobby Witt Jr.’s standards is still good enough to make him a deserving MVP.

I don’t know if Witt is going to win his first MVP this year. Ours is the only flavor of WAR in which he leads the AL, and he leads by just a quarter of a win. He ranks third by Baseball Reference’s rWAR and is eighth by Baseball Prospectus’ WARP. Yordan Alvarez leads all of baseball in WARP because he’s hitting like, well, Yordan Alvarez and staying healthy like, well, someone other than Yordan Alvarez. Cam Schlittler leads the AL in Baseball Reference WAR, and he’s been so dominant that he deserves consideration for the Cy Young-MVP combo — if only he’d pitched just 23 fewer innings last year, he could’ve gone for the trifecta with Rookie of the Year. Kevin McGonigle has played like an MVP from the moment he arrived in Detroit, and Junior Caminero has surpassed 40 home runs for the second season in a row as a 23-year-old. All of these guys have a case, and they aren’t the only ones who merit inclusion in the discussion:

I’m not really here to talk about the horse race, to debate the meaning of the word value, or to make a case for Witt. Those particular articles are not hard find and will soon be hard to avoid (especially since the dominance of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Jacob Misiorowski, Schlittler, McGonigle and JJ Wetherholt have made the AL MVP the only major award that’s really in question). If you want to read a particularly good example, you should check out the one Mario Delgado Genzor wrote for Baseball Prospectus on Friday. I want to focus on something slightly different — namely, how good Witt has already been in years when he missed out on an MVP and how unusual it would be for him to win it this year.

(A quick note before we get into it: We’re about to spend a lot of time talking about WAR. I know I mentioned rWAR and WARP earlier. They’re an important piece of the puzzle, especially due to the outsized effect rWAR in particular has on the MVP conversation, but from here on out, we’re sticking with good old FanGraphs WAR.)

This is Witt’s fifth major league season, and you could argue that it’s his fourth consecutive MVP-caliber campaign. Mind you, that argument would focus only on 2022, in which he put up 5.9 WAR, good for 10th in the majors. There’s no argument to be had about the 2024 and 2025 seasons. That said, along with Shohei Ohtani’s combined 9.2-WAR 2022 sesaon, they are the two most valuable seasons this decade for which a position player did not win an MVP. In 2024, Witt ran a 169 wRC+, stole 31 bases, and put up a Fielding Run Value of 11, fourth among all shortstops. That was good for 10.5 WAR, and it took the best season of Aaron Judge’s career – 58 home runs, a 19% walk rate, and a .322 batting average – to beat him. In 2025, Witt put up 8.0 WAR with a 130 wRC+, 38 steals, and 20 FRV, the best mark among all shortstops. Again, he was bested by a 10-win season from Judge and Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer campaign. Witt has never received a first place MVP vote.

Crow-Armstrong, who has the National League MVP all but locked down, gives us a great example of what it normally takes to win an MVP award. He may even finish with 10.5 WAR through his excellence in all three phases of the game, just like Witt did in 2024. Players like Judge, Ohtani, and Mike Trout, whose base level of talent is so high that a healthy campaign is almost sure to keep them a step above the rest of the league, don’t come around all that often. Even when they do come around, they still need to be playing at something close to their peak, and peaks don’t last that long. Until Ohtani, the only player to win more than three MVPs was Barry Bonds, whose regimen for raising and widening his peak has been well documented. Sometimes that’s because of voter fatigue, but often it’s because somebody else popped up with an amazing, undeniable season like PCA’s. Most of the time, the MVP is an already great player for whom everything goes perfectly. They stay healthy and they play not just their best, but over their heads. Think of Ronald Acuña Jr. winning the NL MVP in 2023 with 9.1 WAR, 4.1 more than his next-best total, or Mookie Betts winning the AL MVP in 2018 with 10.2 WAR, 2.8 more than his next-best total.

Generally speaking, since the voting started getting more rigorous in the last couple decades, those are the two categories of players who win MVPs. We see all-time greats who perform like only they are capable of performing, and we see excellent players who put it all together in a blaze of glory. Witt’s 2024 season probably falls into that second category. He wasn’t quite at his defensive or baserunning peak, but he put up his best season at the plate by nearly 40 points of wRC+ and DRC+, and he ended up with an all-timer of a season. His 10.5 WAR tied for the 36th-best position player campaign of all time. His company? Willie Mays and Babe Ruth twice apiece, Barry Bonds, and Rogers Hornsby. Unfortunately, he ran into one of those special players from the first category, in the form of Judge. If Witt had put up those 2024 numbers this year, he’d be en route to a unanimous MVP just like PCA.

But I said “in theory” earlier, and I said it because Witt isn’t done yet. He’s still just 26, and if not for those weeks he missed with back tightness, or a wOBA that’s more than 30 points below his xwOBA, he’d now be wrapping up his third straight seven-plus-win season. He’s elite in every facet of the game and he doesn’t look like he’s in danger of slowing down any time soon. It wouldn’t be much of a shock to see him rediscover his nine- or 10-win form. In other words, there’s at least a chance Witt belongs to that first category of player and not the second.

Earlier I mentioned Acuña and Betts claiming MVPs by putting up the best years of their careers by a long shot. That’s pretty standard. Especially in recent years, it’s awfully rare for a player to take home an MVP award in something other than the best season of their career, unless they also won the MVP in the best year of their career. Leaving those multi-time MVPs out (and excluding 2020 for obvious reasons), here’s the whole list of players who won an MVP in a year that wasn’t their best by fWAR since 2011: Giancarlo Stanton and Paul Goldschmidt.

Goldschmidt put up 6.8 WAR in his 2022 NL MVP season and 7.2 in 2015. In that sense, Goldschmidt fit a third archetype: the established star who doesn’t put up their biggest WAR total, and instead wins MVP as something of a career achievement award. Stanton put up 6.5 WAR in 2017, not quite the 6.8-win campaign he put up in 2014, but he was facing a weaker field, he was more established as a star, and he had the cachet of a 59-homer season. We’re talking about gaps of less than half a win. We had some multi-time winners, but Acuña, Betts, Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich, Jose Altuve, Kris Bryant, Josh Donaldson, Andrew McCutchen, and Buster Posey all won MVP in the best seasons of their career by fWAR.

Let’s say that Witt does win the MVP this year. For the sake of round numbers, let’s say he closes strong and finishes with 7.0 WAR. That would be just the third-best season of his career, and a full 3.5 WAR below his career-high. Baseball Reference lists MVP winners going back to 1911, and in that time, Witt would become just the ninth position player to win MVP in a season that trailed their best year by such a wide margin. The list of players to do it before him is full of three-time MVPs like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Mike Schmidt. Not only that, but you’ll note that if Witt does make this list, the only higher number in either column will belong to Mantle:

The last person to do so was Robin Yount, who won the AL MVP with 9.8 WAR in 1982, and then again with 5.3 WAR in 1989, long before anybody knew that Total Zone considered him the 11th-worst defender in the majors. This hasn’t happened in nearly 30 years, and Witt is in a very different boat here. He’s not one of the two MVP favorites because his season looks great to the eye but doesn’t fool the advanced metrics. He’s not an aging star who can count on some lifetime-achievement votes. He’s a young gun who’s leading his league in WAR because he excels in every facet of the game.

I realize that this is far from the most meticulous analysis I’ve ever conducted, and that MVP voting is and should be about more than WAR. Still, I hope I’ve put this season in the context it deserves. By our measuring stick, Witt has been the best player in the American League this season. He’s done so despite missing time due to injury. He’s done so despite some bad batted ball luck. And he’s done so despite not even coming close to the highest gear we know he’s got available to him, because that gear is so high that it’s normally reserved for inner-circle Hall of Famers. However the voting goes, Witt’s been in MVP form for three or four years now.