The BBWAA Did A Great Job

Yesterday, the BBWAA announced the last of their major awards for the 2017 season, with Jose Altuve and Giancarlo Stanton taking home the MVP honors for their respective leagues. And while there were certainly more-than-reasonable cases to be made for the runner-up to take the top spot, the overall results of the voting show that the BBWAA is, more than ever, doing a pretty great job in rewarding the right players for their performances.

The NL MVP ballots, for instance, reflect the difficulty of actually splitting the hairs that separated the two best players in the NL this year. Stanton was named the official winner, but it was basically a tie, with Stanton edging Joey Votto 302 to 300 in voting points. Both players got 10 first place votes. Stanton got one more second place vote and one more third place vote, with Votto getting two more fourth place votes, which proved to be the margin of victory.

That Stanton and Votto, both playing on losing teams, were the consensus best candidates shows how far the voters have come. It wasn’t that long ago that we spent a lot of time trying and failing to convince people to vote for Mike Trout and his +10 WAR seasons as MVP, as the “his team didn’t make the playoffs so he wasn’t valuable” argument gave us all concussions from hitting our heads against a wall. The fact that 10 first place votes were split between Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, and Kris Bryant — each of whom reached the postseason — shows that this idea still has real influence, but it is no longer the gatekeeper of the top of the ballot, which marks real progress.

Of course, there have been years before where a star on a non-contender has won the MVP award, but it’s usually been when that player was overwhelmingly the best player in the league that year. Stanton put up the kind of numbers that, 10 or 20 years ago, probably would have been anointed as that guy, and if the voters had ignored his team’s record, he likely would have won it handily. But despite finishing with 23 fewer home runs, Votto nearly won the award anyway, as the voters recognized the value of his walks and doubles, things that haven’t always been well rewarded in the postseason awards.

And it’s not just the NL MVP that shows voter progress here. The AL MVP debate centered around the two guys worthy of winning, and those two got all 30 of the first place votes. Maybe it was closer between Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge than the 27 to 3 first place vote difference suggests, but Altuve winning is no kind of tragedy, as both were excellent this year. And the middle of the AL ballot is kind of remarkable for its rationality.

Mookie Betts, for instance, finished sixth in the voting, despite hitting .264/.344/.459 on the season, launching just 24 home runs from a corner outfield spot. Betts finished third, fourth, or fifth on half the ballots almost entirely on the strength of his defensive value. For a long time, the MVP award was decidedly almost entirely on offensive value, with just some minor adjustments made for position played, but now we’re at a point where a corner outfielder who put up average offensive numbers is getting significant votes based on his defensive contributions.

Andrelton Simmons finished ahead of Nelson Cruz, who led the league in RBIs, and is exactly the kind of candidate voters have previously overrated. Byron Buxton, who struggled so badly in April that his futility became a national story, was named on three ballots despite putting up a 90 wRC+. This particular crop of AL voters clearly valued defense, and that’s a refreshing change from not very long ago.

In the Cy Young races, whether you agree with Corey Kluber and Max Scherzer winning or not, the candidates were clearly the right ones. The debate didn’t hinge on pitcher wins in any real way, and instead, voters tried to weigh the difference between Scherzer’s quantity and Clayton Kershaw’s quality. Maybe we’d weigh those differences differently, but they certainly asked the right question, and ended up with the right top two.

This year, there’s really nothing to be outraged about. The voters mostly identified the best players, looked at their overall individual performances, and weren’t unduly swayed by the performances of their teammates or some outdated measures of offensive performance. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for disagreement, or even further improvement — Anthony Rendon continues to be inexplicably underrated — but the kinds of disagreements that these ballots foster are areas where we’re mostly not sure who was actually better. The differences lie in the gray areas where our metrics aren’t precise enough to support a firm conclusion. The conversations are about our uncertainties, and the voters’ admissions of what we know and we don’t know yet.

That doesn’t mean I agree with the named winner of each award, or that every voter’s process makes perfect sense. But the improvements in recent years have been clear, and this year, we have to acknowledge that the voters did an excellent job of determining which players belonged in the discussion, and then mostly had the right kind of conversations about how to tell those players apart.

For years, the BBWAA Awards were a source of constant frustration. Now, they’re probably the most accurate representation of who performed well this past season of any awards out there. So, to the BBWAA, congratulations on being malleable enough to change when necessary. It wasn’t always obvious that would happen, but it has, and it was quite nice to have an awards week where the results almost universally made sense.