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.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
“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…”
That didn’t stop the voters from electing Jimmy Rollins last year, who was probably the third (but maybe the second) best player on his team.
Good stuff. It’s nice to see someone not ignore Kinsler’s fielding issues.
I didn’t realize Hamilton was so bad in center. As for June 25, Justin’s combined STATS and BIS zone rating numbers showed him as just about average. Interesting.
Bradley has actually played 165 games in the corner outfield. I don’t know what his fielding numbers have been like this year, but he’s been at least average in the past (and can handle center when healthy). He probably deserves a little more credit defensively than he gets with a full DH penalty. But he probably also deserves a little less credit when you consider playing time — he’s had more than 100 fewer PAs than Kinsler, which matters in a replacement-level analysis.
Nice analysis. Although, I guess you could just use a single metric like VORP that will factor in the position played (but not defense, but I don’t think D plays a big role in MVP voting)-
Kinsler- 47.8 VORP
Bradley- 41.2
Hamilton- 38.8
Looks like Kinsler gets the nod based on how much he produces at the 2B position, and how valuable he is in the sense that it would be toughest for the team to replace him.
Hmmm, if Hamilton and Bradley are at +1.9 wins 60% of the way through, that projects out to just over +3 wins for the entire season. Seems like the league MVP ought to be a lot higher than that.
Mitch, Dave was addressing who’s actually been most valuable, not who the writers would vote for.
JM, you’ll get higher numbers if you do the same thing for names like Grady Sizemore, Alex Rodriguez, and Joe Mauer.
I didn’t do a replacement level adjustment, so these are wins compared to average. A +3 wins over average for a full year is close to +5 wins above replacement, which is certainly an all-star a borderline MVP candidate.
What about steals? Kinsler is 25/26, Hamilton 7/7, and Bradley 4/3. Is there any way to quantify the effect of Kinsler’s excellent success in this area on his offense, and is it conceivable that the steals make up .4 wins?
I may have a personal investment in thinking that excellent performance in stolen bases should matter, as I like to think that Ichiro’s performance in this regard at least partially makes up for his power outage.
Peter you are personally invested in Ichiro? I want a piece of that! Just kidding.
I love WPA/LI for analyzing who has produced relative to the importance of the situation, but for those of us who believe most of how much success is produced in high versus low leverage situations is due more to luck than repeatable skill, where does that leave us?
For example I think Teixeira hit a 0.00 wpa homer the other day in the blowout loss to Washington.