We’ve got a lot of weeks ahead of debating Felix Hernandez vs. Corey Kluber, as the Cy Young race seems like it ought to be a dead heat. Several different elements come into play, and to be perfectly honest it’s basically impossible to separate the two from one another, but something that’ll get talked about is Felix’s ERA advantage. While Kluber has outstanding peripherals, people also care about actual runs, and Kluber’s allowed a dozen more runs than Felix has. Some of this is probably because of defense. Some of this is probably because of ballpark environment. But you also have to consider this:

Felix Hernandez 2014 splits

Bases empty: .259 wOBA allowed
Runner(s) on: .215
Scoring position: .208

In run-scoring opportunities, Felix this year has stepped up his game. With the bases empty, that wOBA allowed ranks tied for 22nd. With runners on, that wOBA allowed ranks first, and by a whole 17 points. As you could guess, this sort of thing needs to be regressed, and it won’t surprise you to learn that Felix’s BABIP is also lower in run-scoring situations. But this goes beyond just a BABIP thing. Felix probably deserves some credit for this, because that doesn’t all seem like a fluke.

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The winner of the 2014 American League Cy Young Award is going to be either Felix Hernandez or Corey Kluber. Yes, indeed, there are other worthwhile candidates, and yes, you can argue whether Chris Sale should be penalized that heavily for his injury early on, but it’s a virtual lock that this is coming down to one of the two guys. So let’s just accept that assumption, and move forward. Which of the pitchers is going to win? And just how big will the winning margin be?

When we talk about awards, I don’t think we really care about the awards. I think it’s about the fun of trying to solve a problem, and about seeing how other people try to solve the same problem. It’s basically mental exercise, and in many cases there’s no obviously clear deserving winner and you can get as detailed as you like. For example, let’s take Felix vs. Kluber. You know one way to get really detailed? What’s Felix’s benefit of having pitched to Mike Zunino, against Kluber’s benefit of having pitched to Yan Gomes? That’s a question worth asking. This is really the fun of it every year, but for purposes of this post, let’s not try to figure out our own preferred winner. Rather, let’s consider the actual voters’ processes. What will the results tell us about how the BBWAA feels about splits?

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Because this is an internet baseball column in the year 2014, Derek Jeter was its original subject. The world doesn’t really need another Jeter column, especially one that smugly notes the uncanny similarities between Jeter’s season as a 40-year old shortstop and the 2007 season of Omar Vizquel, the last man to qualify for the batting title as a quadragenarian in the middle of the diamond.

Nobody needs to read that column. The Jeter farewell tour is almost over, and those who want it go to away will be happy and those who appreciate the generation of superlative play Jeter provided will be sad. My opinion on the matter doesn’t really matter. The exercise did bear fruit in one way, however. Looking that the Yankee Captain’s age-40 season (poor, even by 40-year old infielder standards) got me thinking about Jeter’s age-35 season, which was truly one for the ages.

It was 2009 and the Yankees won the World Series, thanks to Jeter’s heroics and a host of very pricey teammates all contributing in significant ways. But Jeter was incredible that year, posting a 130 wRC+ and just under 7 WAR* – it works out to be one of the ten best age-35 seasons since World War II.

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With a week to go in the regular season, the AL MVP race is all but over. Mike Trout is going to win it this year, and the only question is whether he’s going to win unanimously. There’s no real argument at the top this year, and no real way you can even make a case for anyone else. He’s been the best hitter in baseball. He’s still a great baserunner. He plays an up-the-middle position. He’s hit even better in clutch situations. His team won the division. Unless a voter just wants to draw attention to himself, the #1 spot on the AL MVP ballot is as easy as picking the NL Cy Young award this year.

But spots #2 through #10 are still pretty interesting, with a lot of players having good-but-not-transcendent seasons. And going through the process of filling out the top 10 lets us talk about the process of evaluating different player types, so while it probably doesn’t matter whether someone finishes 4th or 7th in the grand scheme of things, I’ll present my full ballot with an explanation for each player. To the list.

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“Ever notice that nobody talks about the length of the games when they talk about injuries being up around baseball?” Oakland outfielder Sam Fuld asked before a game with Texas. Maybe it’s time to remedy that.

It’s a simple fact that games are longer. Even before replay became a thing, games were trending longer. Look at the average minutes per game for matchups that went longer than eight innings, and see it jump even since 2002:

Though there are plenty of good theories about why there’s a rise in Tommy John surgeries, perhaps we’re missing the simplest explanation: longer games and more strikeouts means more pitches. More pitches means more chances to hurt yourself.

Look at pitcher injuries since 2002. Even in this short time frame, we’re losing more days to the DL:

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Jose Altuve’s career is notable because he is a 5-foot-5 man from Venezuela making a living as a professional athlete in America. Jose Altuve’s season is notable because of hits. Lots and lots of hits.

Total number of hits isn’t typically something at which we look to evaluate a player’s performance or ability, because not all hits are created equal. 150 hits is not always better than 130 hits. We all know this. But when a player begins to approach or exceed 200 hits – regardless of what those hits are – they’re having a good season. They’re having a season worth celebrating.

Altuve, as of this writing, is at 220 hits. That’s the most ever by a player from Venezuela. That’s the most ever by a player for the Astros. That’s the most by a player in the MLB since Ichiro in 2009. Ichiro racked up 225 that year. Altuve, with six games remaining, is projected to finish with 228. If he does indeed surpass that total of 225, you’ll have to go back to 2007 when Ichiro had 238 hits to find a player with more than Altuve. No matter what happens, the point remains: Jose Altuve has had a remarkable season.

Granted, Altuve is running a .365 batting average on balls in play. We tend to look at BABIP as a measure of how lucky or unlucky a player might have been. Only Starling Marte and Christian Yelich have a higher BABIP than Altuve, so it would be easy to point to Altuve’s BABIP and deem him lucky and due for regression. Which, in part, is true. Altuve’s career BABIP prior to this year was .317 and, really, anyone who has a single-season BABIP over .350 or so experienced some sort of good fortune. But there are things a player can do to help sustain a high BABIP. There are things Altuve has done to help sustain a high BABIP. Let’s see how Jose Altuve got to 200 hits.
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I have a little theory I choose to believe because it keeps me warm when times are cold. That theory is that, in every offseason, there’s a championship team to be built, and to be built reasonably, without costing an unrealistic amount. It’s not something that can ever be proven, and it’s not even necessarily interesting if you consider an offseason has virtually infinite possibilities, but I like to think the pieces are always out there, no matter how bad a team might’ve been the year before. It allows for hope, independent of circumstances. If it wasn’t your year, it could be your year.

We can at least try to support the theory with numbers from 2014. On the one hand, we can’t say anything about winning a championship, because you can never predict how that’ll play out. But to compensate for that, why don’t we take the idea to the extreme? Let’s say the idea is to build a good team. Nevermind building a good team through a reasonable sequence of moves. How about building a good team through an impossibly cheap sequence of moves? How about doing that without any kind of foundation already in place?

The idea, in short: construct a good 2014 baseball team out of players that would’ve cost nothing or almost nothing to acquire before the season. I’m not going to worry about getting 25 guys; I’ll just fill the important spots. The theory holds up to some extent, as the team you see below would, statistically, be about as strong as the best in the league. The obvious caveat is that, under different circumstances, maybe these players don’t put up the same performances. Maybe they received particular instruction from their 2014 employers, that maybe they wouldn’t get in the hypothetical organization we’re running. Totally valid! And maybe Troy Tulowitzki would’ve busted had he been drafted by the Mariners. We can never really know anything, so let’s just keep things simple and have some fun before we’re all dead.

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We’ve provided a lot of odds this season. There are current playoff odds, based on projections. There are current playoff odds, based on season-to-date numbers. There are current playoff odds, based on coin flips! There are past playoff odds, from any date in 2014. There are division series odds, and league championship series odds, and World Series odds. We’ve also, more quietly, provided single-game odds during the year. At the start of each day, these are based on the starting pitchers and the team projections. Later on, the odds are updated to take into consideration the respective starting lineups. We haven’t put these numbers to much editorial use, but they’ve been there, and over the course of the year most of the kinks have been worked out.

So, okay, keep that in mind. Those numbers have existed. Something else to keep in mind: the Rangers just swept the A’s in three games in Oakland. The Rangers are terrible. The A’s are just playing terrible. Have you connected the points? Allow me to connect the points. Turns out that was a particularly remarkable sweep.

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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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