With yet another day to go before actual baseball returns to the field, I thought I would take a quick look at some of the potential MVP candidates in both leagues based on the first half of the season.

Identifying MVP candidates is certainly not a straightforward process, nor is the criteria universally agreed upon. Knowing this I will not begin or end this article with any claim to have identified the “proper” candidates. These are my candidates based on my way of looking at the term “valuable”.

So what is my criteria? Well, I like to think of MVPs as players that provide an exceptional amount of production in both an absolute and relative sense. This means identifying players that lead or are close to leading the league in production, but where there is also a sizable gap between their production and that of the second best player on their own team. This means that I do tend to discount great performances by players that happen to share the same uniform as equally great players. Is it their fault? Absolutely not. In fact, those players could likely be the best all around players in the entire league. But when it comes to value I think there is a relative component that should be considered. This isn’t to necessarily give credit to the player (i.e. they don’t “step it up” to make up for the gap in talent on the team), but rather to the performance itself.

Like I said, this is my criteria and I don’t claim that it should trump all others, nor would I say it is complete on it’s own. Rather, I think it’ a useful starting place.

Okay, enough with the preamble. Let’s get to the data.

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The All-Star Game is over and it’s time to turn our attention to the second half of the season. All of the teams still in contention face questions as games get underway on Friday. We will take a look at those questions in two posts. Today, we’ll discuss what to look for in the National League when play resumes. On Thursday, we’ll address the American League.

The NL East is a four-team race. The Nationals are the leader in the clubhouse at the break, with a four-game lead over the Braves (five in the loss column) and a four-and-a-half-game lead over the Mets (six in the loss column). The Marlins are nine back with the Phillies in last place fourteen games behind the Nats. For the Marlins, that is a lot of ground to make up, but the NL East teams will play a lot of games against each other just after the All-Star Break. That could solidify the Nationals’ lead or tighten the race even further.

The Braves and Mets are essentially tied with the Giants and the Cardinals for the two wild card spots, just behind the Reds, who trail the Pirates by a game in the Central. The Diamondbacks, Marlins and Brewers sit three-and-a-half, four-and-a-half, and five-and-a-half back, respectively.

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If being a subject of more study, research and incredulity than perhaps any other pitcher in baseball is a burden to R.A. Dickey, the down-to-earth New York Met doesn’t show it. Perhaps it’s because he’s studied, researched and been baffled by the knuckleball more than anyone in the game these days. Maybe he welcomes the help. Given his status as Lead Knuckleball Researcher, it made sense to ask the all-star about some findings about his work and his unique pitch.

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While watching the Mets pound on the Cubs yesterday, I noticed that David Wright still has a walk rate (BB%) higher than his strikeout rate (K%). If Wright managed to continue this trend through the end of the season it would be the first time in his career he achieved such a feat.

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R.A. Dickey leads the Majors in strikeouts. He has more than Stephen Strasburg, more than Justin Verlander, more than Gio Gonzalez. Nobody in baseball has generated as many strike threes as R.A. Dickey. Since he has never done anything like this before — his next strikeout will actually match his 2010 total — people are asking him what he’s doing differently. After his second straight one hitter last night, Dickey was asked this again. His response:

“The strikeouts, you can look at FanGraphs or PITCHF/x or whatever you do to figure it out.”

Who are we to turn R.A. Dickey away? So, by order of the guy actually doing it on the field, let’s do just what he asked.

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On the first of June, left-hander Johan Santana labored through 134 pitches and meticulously navigated around five walks to become the first player in New York Mets history to throw a no-hitter.

It was assuredly a special moment for the organization, as well as the entire fan base. The Mets’ manager, Terry Collins, understood the magnitude of the situation. Despite the fact that Santana missed all of 2011 with a shoulder injury and had largely been limited in his pitch counts throughout the year to that point, Collins stuck with his 33-year-old veteran in an attempt to rewrite the history books.

To counteract the extra strain put on the shoulder in that no-hitter, Johan Santana received extra rest before his next start. That decision caused the left-hander to develop rust, according to his manager, and Santana was not sharp against the New York Yankees his next start — he surrendered six runs over five innings, including four home runs.

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Mets right-hander and soft-spoken Southern gentleman R.A. Dickey threw his second consecutive one-hitter tonight — in this case, against the Orioles of Baltimore. Nor do his defense-independent numbers suggest that he was anything but excellent on Monday night (box): 9.0 IP, 30 TBF, 13 K, 2 BB, 11 GB on 15 batted-balls (73.3% GB), 1.14 xFIP.

The average knuckleball from Dickey has approximately zero inches of horizontal movement and a single inch of positive vertical movement — or “rise,” a concept the present author discussed briefly earlier on Monday. Of course, the idea of an “average” knuckleball is a bit of a misnomer: given the nature of the pitch, the standard deviation of both sorts of movement is likely quite high. Indeed, this is the strength of the pitch: no one really knows where it’s going, not even Dickey.

As a sort of celebration of Dickey’s last two games — of his entire season, really — I sought out Dickey’s three “movingest” knuckleballs from his Monday start. In this case, I’ve identified the three of Dickey’s knuckleballs with the highest absolute value of total movement (i.e. the sum of the absolute values of both horizontal and vertical movement, in inches).

It’s hard to say if what follows are necessarily Dickey’s three best knuckleballs from Monday. However, each of them really does move quite a bit: indeed, the reader will note that catcher Josh Thole is unable to catch two of the three pitches and has to sort of violently move his glove to catch the other.

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After yesterday’s 12-strikeout, no-walk complete game from R.A. Dickey, the league’s best knuckleballer moved into position with the MLB’s fourth-best xFIP, the MLB’s fourth-best ERA, and the 10th-best ERA-minus among historical knuckleballers.

Advanced stats can sometimes fail us with knuckleballers because they produce especially weak contact. In his most recent start, Dickey got 10 ground outs, 1 weak single that may get ruled an error, and 1 infield fly ball. So naturally, FIP and xFIP under-appreciate Dickey to a certain extent, but does that mean he should be in consideration for a Cy Young award?

Yes. Probably very much: Yes.
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Before R.A. Dickey started throwing a knuckleball, he was on his way out of baseball. As a 30-year old who had seen significant action in the Majors in two seasons, but never action that came with a consistent role, he was fighting for a place at the table. And while he initially didn’t have much success with the knuckler, he stuck with it, crawling to freedom through more than three seasons of Pacific Coast League foulness that I can’t even imagine. Or maybe I just don’t want to picture what happens to a knuckleball in Colorado Springs. In that time, the Rangers, Brewers, Mariners and Twins all gave up on him, but now the Mets are reaping the benefits of their combined patience, as Dickey is in the midst of a career year at the tender age of 37.

One of the toughest things about being a knuckleballer is that sometimes, the ball just won’t dance. In a career that included 463 starts, Tim Wakefield’s longest streak of consecutive starts with four runs or less allowed was 12. Sooner or later, the knuckleball will come through straighter than a Katniss Everdeen arrow, and it is going to be tatered. Dickey is no stranger to this phenomenon, as evidenced by his outing on April 18 in Atlanta. But while Dickey has not yet strung together a 12-game streak like Wakefield, he’s come awfully close. In the past calendar year, Dickey has made 32 starts (dating back to June 11 of last year), and he has allowed four runs or less in 29 of them. In that time, his 3.37 FIP is tied with Johnny Cueto for 22nd-best in the game among qualified starters, ahead of such luminaries as Jered Weaver, Felix Hernandez, Tim Lincecum and James Shields. And as the astute observer will notice, you can even back up four more starts to May 20, 2011, and make that 33 of his last 36 starts allowing four runs or less.

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The Mets have four first basemen in the field right now, or so the joke goes.

Well, David Wright has been a -10 fielder at third for three straight years, but he’s been scratch this year, and the eye test isn’t so harsh on him. Daniel Murphy, listed as a first baseman in our database, faked a decent second base in 2011, but has twice been felled by a perhaps avoidable accident on the turn of a double play. Now both the eye test and his numbers don’t speak well of his work in the middle infield.

But both of these guys will stay at their respective positions for the time being at least, and their long-term futures with the team are up in the air. It’s the two other first basemen on the team that may come into conflict soon. Once interleague play is complete, the Mets will be faced with a bit of a roster crunch with the way Ike Davis and Lucas Duda have been performing.

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