Rangers MVP

The Texas Rangers are keeping themselves in the wild card race with a monstrous offense trying to overcome some really bad pitching and defense. At the heart of the run scoring machine are three hitters having terrific seasons – Ian Kinsler, Josh Hamilton, and Milton Bradley. At different times in the year, all three have been lauded as potential AL MVP candidates, and you can make a case for each one.

However, it’s hard to argue that your the most valuable player in the league if you aren’t the most valuable player on your own team, so this morning, we’ll try to figure out which one of the Texas trio has been the best so far in ’08.

Let’s start with the offense, using WPA/LI as the metric of choice.

Bradley: 2.82 WPA/LI
Hamilton: 2.58 WPA/LI
Kinsler: 2.49 WPA/LI

Bradley’s pretty clear been the best hitter of the three, with the difference between Hamilton and Kinsler being pretty small. Of course, Bradley’s also spent most of his time at DH, so his offensive performance relative to his peers is less impressive than his teammates. Let’s adjust for position scarcity, using tangotiger’s position spectrum. Over a full season, DHs get a -1.5 win penalty, second baseman get no adjustment, and center fielders get a 0.5 win bonus. We’re 60% of the way through the season, so we’ll use 60% of those adjustments, giving us the following position adjusted offensive estimates:

Bradley: 1.9 offensive wins added
Hamilton: 2.9 offensive wins added
Kinsler: 2.5 offensive wins added

Hamilton takes a firm lead, with Bradley falling to the back of the pack. However, defense counts too, and since Hamilton and Kinsler take the field, we have to factor their performances with the glove as well (Bradley’s already been docked heavily for DH’ing, so we don’t further dock him in defensive analysis). We’ll use the Fielding Bible +/- numbers from Bill James Online for our purposes here, since it’s the best defensive metric out there published in season.

John Dewan’s system has Hamilton as a -10 play defender in center field and -2 in right field. Those 12 plays that he didn’t make are basically equivalent to one win lost. Hamilton’s really a right fielder being stretched beyond his skills in CF, so some of his offensive value is given back when his defense is compared to players with more range.

Kinsler isn’t a particularly great defensive second baseman either, and +/- isn’t much kinder to him, giving him a -13 mark that ranks him 32nd among major league second baseman. Ouch.

So, we chop 1 win off for both Hamilton and Kinsler, and our new win values for the Texas Trio come out as follows:

Bradley: 1.9 wins added
Hamilton: 1.9 wins added
Kinsler: 1.5 wins added

After defense is factored in, Hamilton and Bradley come out even, while Kinsler falls back to third place. While his offense is terrific compared to other second baseman, +/- doesn’t really see Kinsler as much of a second baseman, and the overall nods go to the guys having the better offensive seasons.

There’s still a good chunk of the season to go, but right now, I’d have to go with Josh Hamilton as the Rangers MVP, slightly edging out Bradley in a situation where you could make a case for either one. Does he have a case for league MVP? We’ll get to that tonight.