The MVP Award

In real life, the MVP award should be a no brainer. Advanced statistics have progressed to the point that we really can identify who the best players are and get a reasonably close approximation of how many runs or wins they contribute. The writers still often get it wrong because their job is to tell a story, not provide real analysis. They tend to focus too much on team success, dramatic home runs, and September batting average. Side note: if I had a vote in real life I'd vote for Pujols and A-Rod (with Sizemore a close second).

In HBD, it's much more difficult to choose an MVP. The stats we have are not easy to access and the ones we don't have leave us missing a piece of the puzzle. Players aren't necessarily known to everyone and since the GM's are doing the voting, they tend to vote for their own players if given the choice*.

*I have absolutely no evidence to back up this claim. I just assume you do. If you don't, good for you.

Season 9 has given us 5 great choices in each league, but no easy way to distinguish them. The most advanced stat available on the voting page is OPS. Which is nice, but kind of...well imperfect. See it's great for separating good players from mediocre ones, but lacks the precision needed for this analysis. 4 out of the 5 AL candidates have OPS's within 90 points of each other, with the fifth playing half his games in an extreme pitchers park. In the NL, it's even closer, a swing of only 50 points.

We can throw RBI out the window, it's a context driven stat that tells us very little. Batting average is also flawed both in general and when used to try to pick the best out of five great players. Home runs are great, but need a little bit of context - park effects can have a large influence.

So what do we do? We don't have stats like VORP, WARP, and Eqa to really shed light on the players' individual production. We don't have advanced fielding metrics to show who really shines on defense. And it's difficult to use ratings. Since none of us really knows what rating does what, how could we argue that player A and his 91 power & 85 eye is better than player B and his 92 VR & 84 power?

*if you do some digging you can get runs created, but I've never been a huge fan of this stat

So how did I vote? I'll explain in the next post.