The Mike Trout MVP Precedent
Most of the time when we talk about Mike Trout, we ask if anybody has ever done what he’s doing. Sometimes the answer is Mickey Mantle or Ty Cobb or Albert Pujols, but a lot of the time the answer is no and what Trout is doing is unprecedented. Today, we are asking two related questions:
- Could Mike Trout deserve the American League Most Valuable Player Award despite missing 39 games earlier this season?
- Does Mike Trout have a realistic chance to win MVP despite missing 39 games earlier this season?
While answering the second question might help prove the first through precedent, let’s restrict ourselves in the first part to the value Mike Trout provides. On Friday, I talked about Jose Altuve’s candidacy for MVP and showed this chart:
| Name | WAR | ROS WAR | EOS Projection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jose Altuve | 5.7 | 1.7 | 7.4 |
| Mike Trout | 4.5 | 2.8 | 7.3 |
| Aaron Judge | 5.8 | 1.4 | 7.2 |
| Mookie Betts | 4.4 | 1.8 | 6.2 |
| Jose Ramirez | 4.2 | 1.5 | 5.7 |
| Andrelton Simmons | 4.3 | 1.4 | 5.7 |
| George Springer | 3.8 | 1.5 | 5.3 |
| Justin Upton | 3.5 | 1.2 | 4.7 |
| Justin Smoak | 3.7 | 0.8 | 4.5 |
| Carlos Correa | 3.9 | 0.2 | 4.1 |
Through August 3
Things have already changed considerably. This is what the top of that chart looks like now.
| Name | WAR | ROS WAR | EOS Projection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Trout | 5.1 | 2.6 | 7.7 |
| Jose Altuve | 5.9 | 1.6 | 7.5 |
| Aaron Judge | 6.0 | 1.3 | 7.3 |
| Andrelton Simmons | 4.6 | 1.3 | 5.9 |
| Mookie Betts | 4.2 | 1.5 | 5.8 |
So Trout is currently projected to be the AL position player WAR leader at the end of the season. If he keeps up his current pace and gets close to the the 200 more plate appearances he is projected for, he is going to get above 8 WAR. Trout is currently above a 200 wRC+, a number that hasn’t been reached since Barry Bonds and done by only nine players in non-strike seasons in history. He will actually have to exceed his projections in PAs to qualify for the batting title, as he is currently set to fall eight short.
While the above information isn’t definitive and there are a lot of ways to define value, it certainly seems that Trout is likely to have a strong argument at the end of the season that he has been the AL MVP. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is realistic. He’s likely to get dinged by voters for missing nearly a quarter of the season with an injury. To potentially strengthen Trout’s argument, let’s take a look at previous MVP races and see if we can find any similar situations.
Since 1961, when the season was expanded to 162 games, there have been 97 position players with MVP awards in non-strike seasons (1981, 1994, and 1995 were strike-shortened). The graph below shows the PAs of every one of those MVP winners. As you can see, MVPs generally play a lot.
That chart might be tough to read at the bottom, but in summary, MVP winners have averaged 666 PAs since 1961. Only nine failed to reach 600 PAs, only four didn’t make it to 550, and only two MVPs didn’t qualify for the batting title. Let’s take a closer look at the far right of the chart and look at the nine players plus Trout who didn’t make it 600 plate appearances.
In 2003, Barry Bonds put up 10.2 WAR despite only coming to the plate 550 times, in the middle of winning four consecutive MVPs from 2001-2004. Rickey Henderson exceeded 10 WAR in 1990 on his way to MVP. Josh Hamilton was pretty comfortably leading the AL in WAR back in 2010. Joe Morgan was coming off an 11-WAR season in 1975 when he nearly reached double digits in winning the award again in 1976. Elston Howard had a ton of days off throughout the season as the Yankees had a massive lead in the standings for most of the summer back in 1963. Bob Allison actually led the AL in WAR that season, but Howard was on the better team and slightly more productive per plate appearance. Willie Stargell was a platoon first baseman for the “We Are Family” Pirates. he hit for power, but Dave Parker was the best player on that time by quite a bit. The other two players on that list provide some interesting comparisons for Trout this season.
In 1962, Mickey Mantle was coming off a 10-WAR, 54-homer season where he didn’t win MVP as Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s single-season record. He hit almost as well in 1962 with fewer homers and less playing time due to missing 25 games in May and June with a thigh injury. In terms of value, Mantle’s 6.0 WAR was very close to Rocky Colavito and Brooks Robinson though Mantle was much more efficient and neither of those contenders finished anywhere near the top of the MVP voting, something that would likely be more difficult to occur today. All George Brett had to do win the MVP in 1980 was carry a .400 average to the middle of September. Brett missed 25 games with an ankle injury around the same time of year as Trout, and then hit .421/.482/.696 from July to the end of the season to win MVP. Brett’s 9.1 WAR topped the AL.
Mantle and Brett provide some pretty good company and precedent for a season like Trout’s winning the MVP award. Seasons like these are fairly unique, but it is also worth taking a look at seasons like Trout where a player was denied the MVP. Going back a bit further to 1931, here are the seasons of at least 7 WAR and 550 PAs or fewer.
| Name | Team | Season | PA | WAR | WAR Rank | MVP Rank | MVP Winner-WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barry Bonds | Giants | 2003 | 550 | 10.2 | 1 | 1 | Bonds |
| Ted Williams | Red Sox | 1957 | 546 | 9.7 | 2 | 2 | Mickey Mantle-11.4 |
| George Brett | Royals | 1980 | 515 | 9.1 | 1 | 1 | Brett |
| Joe DiMaggio | Yankees | 1939 | 524 | 8.5 | 1 | 1 | DiMaggio |
| Ted Williams | Red Sox | 1954 | 526 | 8.4 | 1 | 7 | Yogi Berra-5.9 |
| Mark McGwire | Athletics | 1996 | 548 | 7.3 | 5 | 7 | Juan Gonzalez-3.5 |
| Ted Williams | Red Sox | 1955 | 417 | 7.1 | 3 | 4 | Yogi Berra-5.2 |
| Chipper Jones | Braves | 2008 | 534 | 7.1 | 6 | 12 | Albert Pujols-9.2 |
| Al Kaline | Tigers | 1967 | 550 | 7 | 4 | 5 | Carl Yastrzemski-11.1 |
| Chris Hoiles | Orioles | 1993 | 503 | 7 | 3 | 16 | Frank Thomas-6.3 |
We’ve already talked about the Bonds season as well as the Brett season. Joe DiMaggio missed most of May in 1939 with a leg injury, but still led the league in WAR and won MVP. The players at the bottom half of the chart are players with very good seasons in limited time, but who weren’t the league leaders in WAR that season, even if the league leader didn’t win. The only time a player led the league in WAR in under 550 PAs and didn’t win was in 1954 when Ted Williams, despite the fact that he posted a 207 wRC+. He didn’t play a game until the middle of May and then missed a huge chunk of June before putting together a great season. Boston’s 69-85 season probably didn’t help matters though Minnie Minoso, Mickey Mantle, and Bobby Avila might have had better seasons than eventual winner Yogi Berra.
If you are looking for precedent to give Mike Trout the MVP award despite missing so much time, it is definitely there. We aren’t just talking about exceptions, either. When a player has a truly great season and is best in the league, he generally wins MVP despite the lack of playing time. The incredibly high level of play over a short duration has been deemed more valuable than lesser value with more time on the field. There’s still a ways to go, but if Trout keeps this up, he might win MVP, and he’ll probably deserve it.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
“Chris Sale has a 6.5 WAR projection, but the above list only includes position players.”
Doesn’t he already have 7 WAR with 2 more projected ROS?
His fWAR jumped a lot in the last couple days. Looks like this article was brewing for a while, and that footnote was researched a little bit ago.
Specifically, he had +0.6 WAR in last night’s game. Or +0.7 RA9-WAR.
‘Bryce Harper is currently above a 200 wRC+, a number that hasnāt been reached since Barry Bonds and done by only nine players in non-strike seasons in history. He will actually have to exceed his projections in PAs to qualify for the batting title, as he is currently set to fall eight short.’
Not Bryce!!
correct. was thinking about harper almost doing it two years ago.
I imagine Clayton Kershaw’s 27-start MVP season in 2014 could be relevant to this discussion.
I also believe that last year’s NL Cy Young voting and Kershaw’s season are incredibly relevant as well. Both Trout and Kershaw are and did put up historic numbers, but in far less playing time than their competition. Kershaw finished 5th in voting, and I think Trout finishes 3rd at worst based on competition.
“Bryce Harper is currently above a 200 wRC+” oopsie. Should have been Trout.
“Joe Morgan was coming off an 11-WAR season in 1975 when he nearly exceeded double digits in winning the award again in 1976.”
Dear lord, not even 600 PAs and he had almost 100 WAR? I feel like I should’ve heard about this before.
Joe Morgan is the greatest 2nd baseman in post-integration, period, and it’s not even close.
But perhaps not quite this good.
(also, in 1976 he had 599 PAs, which is not 600 PAs but not in a substantively meaningful way)
Dan’s joke is the way the quote is phrased, that Joe Morgan had a season over 6 times better than Ruth’s best. It has since been corrected to suggest the 9.5 season, rather than a career’s worth.
You’re correct, it’s no contest on post-integration 2B’s careers.
While I’m pretty much always okay with Mike Trout winning an MVP award, it’s worth noting that as of today Chris Sale already has 7 WAR and is projected to top 9 WAR. And if he keeps anything like his current pace up (which is admittedly not likely) he’ll wind up with a WAR closer to 10 than 9.
The problem for Sale is that voters – to the extent that they use WAR – are more likely to rely on Baseball Reference (or they’ll look at them both). And Baseball Reference has Sale at only 5.3 WAR, barely ahead of Kluber (5.1 WAR).
Baseball Reference also gives Altuve a bit more WAR (6.3) than Fangraphs.
So I think Sale has his work cut out for him.
The problem is that bWAR isn’t really a good way to measure how good a pitcher is in a season. fWAR would be better since it relies on FIP for pitchers.
It’s explained much better in this article:
http://joeposnanski.com/porcello-v-verlander/
Starts off by talking about the Cy Young race between Porcello and Verlander. Explains very well why bWAR has its flaws. Definitely an interesting read.
I’m not saying Sale should win AL MVP, but at least, he needs to be in the conversation.
I was also surprised when I saw the discrepancy between bWAR and the RA9-version of fWAR. I had previously thought they were comparable, but Sale has 5.3 bWAR vs. 6.3 fWAR calculated using RA9. Now to dig into why that is the case…
I read that just now, and Posnanski’s assessment jibes with something I’ve seen with bWAR for a while–how they value defense is crazy.
I love Joe but that’s a very poor article. He basically decided ahead of time that Verlander and Porcello were equal. And when he finds that bWAR prefers Verander he decides to pick it apart. But he doesn’t do the same to fWAR (which has plenty of flaws of its own) because it supports his a priori decision about Verlander vs Porcello.
But he did have the class to print Sean Foreman’s response without comment:
http://joeposnanski.com/baseball-reference-war-a-response/
BTW, I’ve generally seen it stated the opposite…that bWAR is better at describing what happened during the season and fWAR is better for future projections.
Anyway, I’ll defer to Tom Tango on this who said that we should just average the two and stop fighting about which is superior.
My point’s being taken in the wrong sense. By no means am I saying that bWAR is “wrong” or fWAR is “perfect”. Rather, I’ll argue that fWAR is a better way or evaluating a pitcher’s success within a season.
Even that statement I just wrote above is flawed in it’s own sense. We still don’t have a metric that “perfectly” measures a pitcher’s success(and I doubt we ever will) but I feel like fWAR is as close as it gets…
But yes, I definitely agree about averaging the two out could end the debate.
No, you were right. bWAR has some major problems. People talk about how fWAR is more predictive while bWAR describes what happened, but the fact is there’s no evidence that bWAR does that. Predictive validity is the only assessment tool we have. IMO, bWAR looks like it is overfitted to me, especially around defense, and that’s why it doesn’t work properly.
The bigger issue is that bWAR is more popular than fWAR right now. I’d argue that if you don’t like either you should use SIERA…or if you’re really stuck on that, use SIERA, bWAR, and fWAR to predict factor scores for each player via confirmatory factor analysis.
I think the problem with fWAR is that certain pitchers do actually outperform or underperform their fip, especially specialty pitchers like extreme gb,submarine or knuckle.
So fwar might overrate strikeout pitchers. Now k pitchers tend to be better but there are also some who underperform their peripherals for years.
Of course RA9 war is even more random, but hr rate is not the most measure for contact quality you can get.
In the future we will have statcast based war based on launch angle and exit velo to judge non homer batted ball events adequately and then we will have the best from both worlds.
Preferring pitcher fWAR to bWAR for awards voting would be like preferring xWOBA+. It will be a sad day if awards start being given for what “should” have happened in a season. Predictive stats are important in a lot of ways, but not here. If a guy hits 50 balls over the fence but all 50 get robbed, he didn’t actually help his team.
You wrote that Harper has a wRC+ above 200 when you probably meant to write Trout, and Sale already has 7 WAR, so I don’t see how it’s possible that he’s projected to end up with only 6.5 WAR.
Each guy other than Bonds also ‘led’ his team to the pennant (or division anyways), which was a big MVP thing in those days.
This post inspired me to look at the 1961 leaderboard and I uncovered this little bit of trivia (previously unknown to me):
Roger Maris’s BABIP in his record-setting year was .209! It doesn’t appear to be (exclusively) a sign of the times or a weird park effect, either. Only one other player in the top-20 in position player WAR had a BABIP under .280, and Maris’ BABIP was lowest among ’61 Yankees regulars by 34 points. Maris was always a low-BABIP guy for his career but that year was his lowest, and well below his career .254 figure.
I love noticing stuff like this. In his record-breaking season, Roger Maris appears to have gotten ridiculously unlucky on non-HR contact.
I suspect Maris was hitting a LOT of fly balls in 1961.
at least 61 of them!
HRs rob you of a double, keeps BABIP down.
I’m sorry, I don’t consider myself much of a pedant, but this piece is in dire need of some copy editing. There are several glaring errors that take away from what should be a compelling article.
Is that Carson’s job? My understanding is he’s caring for his newborn.
That’s nice for Carson but not an excuse for the site just abandoning copyediting while he’s away. There are plenty of freelancers out there.
I think it’s a pretty good excuse. I would rather have the FG team spend their efforts on producing more articles of this quality, instead of spending their money and time finding and managing a freelance copy editor for a temporary effort.
Perhaps if you subscribed to their annual plan they could afford to copy edit for you.
Itās sad to see someone with such poor discipline and such bad attention that a few errors in a wonderful article ruin their experience.
Go back to fox sports. Theyāre video only, no written errors for you.
i know this site is saber-inclined so stats other than WAR tend to get pushed to the background but I have to note that your 5 MVP winners with 550 PA or fewer were:
– 2003 Barry Bonds who put up video-game numbers for a 100 win team
– 1963 Elston Howard who was a catcher on a 104 win team in a season where nobody else put up eye-popping numbers
– 1980 George Brett who flirted with .400, led the league in OPS by over 100 points and still managed 118 RBI (not that far off the league lead of 122 despite the lack of PA) and played for a 97 win team that cruised to the playoffs
– 1962 Mickey Mantle who led the league in OPS by over 100 points in a year without any eye-popping stats and played for a 96 win team
– 1979 Willie Stargell whose award was totally inexplicable on any rational level except that he had been a really good player for a long time . . . .and his team won 98 games.
Though it would surprise nobody if he led the league in OPS by 100+ points, Trout probably won’t reach either 90 runs or RBI, won’t challenge .400, won’t hit 40 HR let alone something like 50 and his team is a good bet to win no more than 80 games.
The only way Trout wins MVP is if he has a monster last 2 months AND his team squeezes into the WC game, and even then he would need Sale, Altuve and Judge to slow down in order for him to barely win it in an election that makes a certain section of the electorate groan.
Simply looking at WAR is just being lazy to be honest.
Trout needs 37 runs and 38 RBI in the Angels last 48 games, not out of the question. Couldn’t you also see 17 homers in that span pushing him to 40? That’s an aggressive pace but, it’s Freaking Mike Trout.
I absolutely could see him doing it. I just don’t think it’s likely and I’m not sure it matters – his team will sabotage him if they finish under .500. I think Judge falls off (he’s actually started already) and Sale will have an uphill battle as a pitcher unlikely to clear 20 wins. But Altuve has a path cleared for him – the best player this year on a 100 win team with Correa and Springer missing time and therefore not splitting the vote for him. He won’t make 100 RBI but he’ll fly past 100 runs, hit over .350 and have something like 220-225 hits.
True, Trout won last year on a 74 win Angels team. However, the most wins for any team last year was 95 and nobody else put up eye-popping numbers. Certainly not much better than Trout’s, Trout himself hit the magical 100 RBI threshold.
This is something no one has written up, and it needs to be. Judge’s wRC+ by month:
199
187
206
116
63 (although he’s got a lot of time to turn that one around)
Of note, his K-percentage has spiked in the last couple of months to well above 1/3rd. This has always been the question for Judge–whether he’ll make enough contact to hammer the ball. Also, his BABIP has gone from an insane and unsustainable .426 in the first half to an insane and unsustainable .216 in the second.
He’s had a great year so far, and he’ll likely be “fine” long-term since neither of those BABIPs likely represent his true talent level, but he may have been playing over his head for a bit at the beginning.
I don’t think even the most optimistic Yankees fans thought that first-half Judge was his true talent level, and that would be a very unfair standard to hold Judge to.
The most optimistic Yankees fans definitely thought that.
Source: My friend, the super-optimistic Yankees fan.
Still, the vast chasm between destroyer of worlds and replacement-level scrub can still be a very good ballplayer.
Yeah people were saying he could hit .400 BABIP because he hits the ball hard.
Just like it was premature to say that 3 months made him an elite player, it’s premature to say that 5 weeks make him something else.
It’s just math – guys who strike out that much simply cannot be elite. Since 1920, the entire list of guys who struck out 30% of the time (min 2,000 PA) is:
Chris Carter 33.3%, .332 wOBA
russell Branyon 32.9%, .347 wOBA
Bo Jackson 32.0%, .342 wOBA
Chris Davis 31.7% , .351 wOBA
Jack Cust 31.7%, .360wOBA
Rob Deer 31.2%, .341
Mark Reynolds 30.9%, .341
Tyler Flowers 30.9%, .313
Jarrod Saltalamachia 30.8%, .313
Drew Stubbs 30.7%, .311
Davis is the leader of that group with 17.8 WAR but of course, his season totals are really bumpy ranging from 7.0 to under 0.0. Judge is Chris Davis 2.0 if he’s lucky – mix in a few monster years where he’s near MVP caliber with years where he hits .220 with a .750 OPS
Judge is better than Chris Davis. This is his rookie season and it’s as good as Davis’ best season. He’s already almost half way to Davis’ career WAR.
WAR credits a player with playing time, even if it is below-average quality (so long as it’s above replacement level).
But if you look at runs-above-AVERAGE instead, Trout is currently 3rd in MLB (instead of 5th). He’s currently only trailing Judge by 3.3 runs-above-average (rather than 8.9 runs-above-replacement). And his projected end-of-season lead would be 7.9 runs-above-average (rather than 1.5 runs-above-replacement) over Altuve.
Why would raising the baseline from replacement to average change players rankings? I don’t know where to see RAA, but I suspect it’s missing some component of WAR like defense, baserunning, or the positional adjustment.
Because WAR gives you credit merely for playing time, which is what I’m trying to strip out. Imagine a player who is slightly below average, but plays every day (say, 2017’s Billy Hamilton). He’ll accrue significant runs-above-replacement, but will have negative runs-above-average. Meanwhile, a guy who is way above average but has played very little (say, Rafael Devers at the moment) will be better in terms of runs-above-average, but worse in terms of runs-above-replacement. Basically, WAR gives you credit just for showing up to work.
RAA is not listed separately in the leaderboards, but you can easily calculate it by adding batting + baserunning + positional adjustment + fielding (all of which are measured in runs-above-average). Or by adding ‘Offense’ and ‘Defense’, which is the same thing. That leaves out the replacement level adjustment (a constant currently set at about 21 runs per 600 PA’s for the AL, and 19 runs/600 for the NL)
Average players aren’t freely available though, so the accumulation of any above replacement level playing time adds value to a team.
As a fan of the stars and scrubs White Sox of the past few years that couldn’t even manage a winning record, this is very true. Even just a few average players could have made the difference. Those guys are plenty valuable.
And Trout is already back to first in offensive RAA, despite missing all that time.
I think the projections are too pessimistic about how many PAs he will get the rest of the way. So far this season, he’s averaged 4.44 PAs per game played. He only has to play 45 of his teams 48 games, averaging the same PAs per game, in order to cross 502 PAs. I’d be surprised to see Trout take any days off the rest of the way as long as the Angels are even remotely in the race.
Set at a min. 300 PAs:
The difference between Trouts slugging percentage and 2nd place Aaron Judge is larger than the difference between Judge and 32nd ranked Scooter Gennett.
Side note: how about Scooter Gennett’s season so far? Not bad.
Hang on, those two charts changing like that imply that Mike Trout has put up 0.6 WAR in 5 days? WTF? Mike F’n Trout man
Is that really how that works?
Because if so the article was posted on 8/4 and the Angels played at 10:07pm ET that day. The Angels hadn’t played yet when this was posted today (8/9). So the idea is that he accumulated .6 WAR in the 4 games 8/5-8/8 …while the Angels went 1-3 with a run differential of -9 against two <.500 teams all at home.
What is the relevance of bringing up how his teammates did in a 4 game stretch?
Sluggin’ Timmy Bexxxx has been worth .9 WAR in 8 games for the Orioles. I may or may not be bitter that the Rays traded him for practically nothing in the middle of a playoff chase.
That’s not at all unusual for Trout. For his career, he’s averaged 0.06 WAR/game. He’s accrued 1+ WAR in 5 game stretches on a number of occasions.
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=10155&legend=1&statArr=58&split=base&time=game&ymin=&ymax=&start=2011&end=2017&rtype=mult>1=5
That graph make me want to puke with how messy it was. Real hack job.
Get it all out. It’ll help you sober up.
The issue left out of this article is that Trout’s playing for a non-playoff team, in almost certain probability. Altuve is the best player on the best team in the American League. Until the award is changed to Player of the Year, many voters (especially from the old school) will attempt to measure that which is difficult, if not impossible, to measure-the value to his team
I think there’s something to incorporating team results to MVP choice, but I also think it’s done wrongly by almost everyone who holds to it. To consider team results while stopping at “best player on the best team” misses the whole point of “valuable”. Value should tell you something about the difference between having and not having that player.
In other words, how much value did this player have for the team’s overall season result? The 2017 editions of Altuve and Trout are both great examples of why this question is more complicated than best player on the best team.
The Angels are probably going to miss the playoffs. If they do, Trout’s wins will be the difference between missing the playoffs and missing the playoffs. In the final standings, in other words, his wins didn’t matter. If you think the season result for the team matters, that merits consideration.
But the same is true of Altuve! The Astros have the best record in the AL and are headed for home advantage throughout the AL playoffs. If we remove the number of wins he is worth from the Astros’ record, they would … have the best record in the AL (barely) and be headed for home advantage throughout the AL playoffs. His wins add nothing at all to the relative competitive position of the Astros, just like Trout’s.
That’s not a knock on what Altuve has done. It’s praise for how good the Astros have been across the board. It’s hard to say the best player on the best team is the most valuable in the whole league when the team would still be the best team even without him.
To me, the better way of incorporating team results is to ask which team would suffer the most meaningful loss without their best player. Right now, that looks like Judge (ignoring trend lines) or Sale to me. Judge’s team is the wildcard leader, but they would be out of the playoffs without him. Sale’s team is leading its division and headed for home advantage in the divisional playoff almost comfortably, but they would be hanging onto the second wildcard without him. Or perhaps the Indians avoiding the wild card game vs. missing the playoffs entirely is the bigger deal to you, in which case Kluber becomes a pretty defensible pick, even while being worth far fewer wins.
I’m fine with this way of thinking. I’m also fine with considering things like WPA, and saying “Look, this guy did more than anyone else to add to the likelihood that his team would win games. Regardless of whether it was simply a matter of distribution, that’s clearly a real outcome and was, in fact, the most valuable.” I’m also fine with simply picking the player who added the output with the most value in a vacuum, regardless of what his contribution to results was. I just wish voters would identify and hold to some real definition of value.
Of course, the flaw in this line of thinking is that it implies value is dependent on context. If I lost $50,000 right now, Iād be destitute. If Mark Zuckerberg lost $1 B, he might not even notice. Is $50,000 more valuable than $1 B? Of course not. Value is independent of context.
Agreed with most of that. But how many voters are as attuned to digging deeper than BA/HR/RBI? It’s getting better every year. But we still have a ways to go. You don’t have to change MY mind….change that of the old guy voters who don’t like these “new-fangled OPS+ or BABIP crap.”
Is Juan Gonzalez’ 3.5 WAR season the lowest for an MVP award winner?
No. Jim Konstanty (!!!!) won the 1950 National League MVP with a WAR of 0.9. He was a reliever. This is possibly the worst selection of an MVP award winner in professional sports history.
Maybe not as ridiculous as it seems on the surface:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/tht-live/did-jim-konstanty-deserve-the-1950-mvp/
Why is Trout projected for only 495 PA? Is it assumed he will miss some more games? If he doesn’t miss any more games–and with the long rest he had on the DL, and the Angels a borderline WC contender, he shouldn’t if healthy–he’s on pace for 518 PA.
Also, Trout has missed 45 games. He missed 39 games with the thumb injury, but missed six other games before that with a hamstring problem. If he should just miss a qualifying number of PA, the latter will loom large.
Don’t projections factor in missed time in recent seasons to help project missed time in the present? He’s missed 11 games over the previous three years, and this year he’s missed 45 games. That’s 14 games per season, on average. With 46 games to go, that rate of games missed so far would lead to roughly 4 missed games the rest of the way. But ZiPS ranks more recent seasons more heavily, so missing their projection of 7 games sounds about right. If he’s healthy to see out the year, he probably beats the projection, but the projection itself seems right.
ZiPS actually has him below 495. Not sure how the other systems work, but they’re now both projecting 500+. As he gains PAs without missing time all the projections will probably climb.
I wouldn’t say a guy who has a great season generally wins even if he missed time when it happened a few times. In almost all cases the mvp plays a full season and trout has lost mvp seasons were he played every day like trout before.
Now voters do now consider WAR but it is one of the stats for them and not the one decider. They decided to give it to miggy for winning the TC and they will give it to altuve when he hits 350 for a 100 win team even if trout leads him by half a win.
The only way trout wins it this year is when altuve struggles down the road or gets hurt hinself.