THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

[blank player] is the best player in the majors due to two months of absurdly good play. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/tom_verducci/08/17/josh.hamilton/index.html

man, you loathe the media, don’t you?  here’s the real answer - you can’t write original stuff all the time, there just isn’t that much original stuff.  so you have to pump some crap out there...lots of crap, in order to make a living as a sports journalist. don’t blame the reporters, blame the crap people enjoy reading over and over again.  It’s the people!!!!

#6 “(blank player) should be MVP, but he toils in the obscurity of a small market, where no one sees him.”

(Somehow that meme in particular lives on, ignoring the pervasiveness of MLB.com, fantasy sports, etc. which allow us all to know how good everyone is at the click of a mouse.)

@#2 anon:  Don’t most of the readers here loathe the media?  That’s one of the reasons a lot of us come here.  I absolutely blame the reporters - it’s part of why I didn’t pick the profession, even though my entire educational background was taking me in that direction.  They could use their platform and influence to make the people smarter; far too often they just pander to what people already know and believe.  The MVP articles are a good example.

sorry...I was being sarcastic, that didn’t seem to come through in the post.  I’m on board with Tango!

Sarcasm detection fail.  My bad anon. 

No sarcasm here. I agree with anon’s post in #2. Pumping out article after article is hard work; it’s even harder to write every article at a high level of originality and intelligence.

Given how many sportswriters there are, seeing articles that seem to copy each other is going to be common. There are only so many legitimate candidates for an award and only so many ways you can write about those players.

It’s boring to read, of course, so I avoid them for the most part.

What is the most valuable thing a player can do to help his team win.  Change the scoreboard offensively, and prevent it from changing defensively.

A walk or single that does not result in a change in the scoreboard, or at least asssist in the change, is worth 0.  An RBI always changes the scoreboard, as does a run scored and HR which does both.  That’s what makes the disdain for RBI’s in MVP talk totally unfathomable, especially when you can adjust for opportunity.

As for preventing runs, until we get play by play defensive metrics which take into account a players actual positioning and batted ball velocity, there is no way to say how valuable a players defense was.  UZR is just an estimate with an unknown uncertainty, possibly a large one, especially over a given season.

What if you hit a home run or drive in a run or score a run in a game your team doesn’t win?  Changing the scoreboard doesn’t help your team win if your team doesn’t win, after all.

How often do people who use RBIs as a quantitative measure of value use figures that are adjusted for opportunity and not actual RBI totals?

Obviously we need to bring back GWRBI as the one true stat.

7:  X should win the award because although Y has all the big stats, X does the little things that make X and Y’s team a winner (see Kent, Jeff, as NL MVP in 2000).

Jeff Kent, 2000.

.334-33-114

7.6 WAR

If he was also doing “all the little things”, then damn .... what a season.

The other Giant went .306-49-129, 7.8 WAR

Let’s face it, in 2000, the media just went with the jerk they hated the least. That was also the year Kent hit 4th (without protection from Bonds).

That’s the unwritten article, “[Player name] should be the MVP, but he’s not friendly with the media, so he’ll never get it.” (Ex: Albert Belle)It’s actually amazing that Juan Gonzalez won 2 MVPs, given that he barely spoke to the media (language issues).

I do think that performence in a conteding sutuation should be consdidered.

BLANK can win with a really good September.

BLANK might not even be the most valuable player on his own team.