Pujols Deemed Most Valuable

by
November 18, 2008

Well, thank goodness for that. The process is still broken and the results still head-scratchingly inane at (often) times, but at least the end result was on the money today as Albert Pujols nabbed his second MVP Award.

Big Al was 2nd in average, 2nd in on base percentage, 1st in slugging, 1st in OPS, 1st in runs created as a rate and as a counting stat. He was 3rd in WPA* but 1st in BRAA and WPA/LI by a mile in each category. Oh and he also plays some of the best first base defense in the league. In short, Pujols was the best non-pitcher in the National League, hands down. And he won, so hurrah for that.

Were there mistakes in the voting? Oh yes. Dave Cameron covered the continuing under appreciation of Chase Utley earlier. The also always criminally underrated Chipper Jones also finished outside the top ten despite being the leader in many of the categories that Pujols finished second in.

Johan Santana, Brandon Webb, Brad Lidge and CC Sabathia all got more votes for MVP than Tim Lincecum, who the BBWAA named the best pitcher in the league, received. I guess that means they were taking the valuable part of Most Valuable Player literally, but then again, the Mets and Diamondbacks missed the playoffs just as the Giants did and how would you really determine which was more valuable anyways? Oh yeah, WPA.

Sorting by WPA, here’s the top five players in the NL for 2008 with their finish in the MVP voting in parenthesis:
1.Manny Ramirez (4th)*
2.Lance Berkman (5th)
3.Albert Pujols (1st)
4.Carlos Beltran (22nd)
5.Matt Holliday (19th)

No pitchers on that list, but if it went down far enough, you’d see Tim Linceum at the top. So how exactly was Johan Santana or Brandon Webb more worthy of votes?

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Now here’s the top five vote getters for MVP in the NL with their WPA rank in parenthesis:
1.Albert Pujols (3rd)
2.Ryan Howard (30th)
3.Ryan Braun (14th)
4.Manny Ramirez (1st)
5.Lance Berkman (2nd)

I don’t ask for the latter list to be identical to the former list. Okay, I sort of do (with some WPA/LI and defense thrown in), but for knowledge’s sake, at least make it close in the first three spots.

In retrospect, it’s probably good that Brad Lidge got as many votes as he did, for if he didn’t those votes might have gone to Ryan Howard and been enough to put him over Albert Pujols and marked 2008 as one (again) for the MVP Award infamous record books.

*If you count Manny’s WPA number as his combined Red Sox and Dodgers WPA figures.





 

Matthew Carruth is a software engineer who has been fascinated with baseball statistics since age five. When not dissecting baseball, he is watching hockey or playing soccer.

3 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Drew
17 years ago

I think this vote is embarrassing. Ryan Howard getting 12 first-place votes when he shouldn’t have even gotten a single top-10 vote is a joke.

I know this is the overly-simplistic stathead argument, but do the voters really just look at home runs and RBI?

0