BP Unfiltered

Right. You can't have your cake and eat it to. If it's about on field performance, then very little in the way of other stats or accomplishes is better than what we've already combined in to one number -- certainly not when the difference is massive. If you want the MVP to be about more than production, fine. But don't claim that it's about more than production and then justify your selection on the basis of Miggy's AVG, HR and RBI.

To put a finer point on it: This debate isn't about old stats vs. new stats. It's about giving awards based on objective assessment of performance vs. giving them based on subjective assessment and narrative value.

To me, we need not go past step #1 above. WARP tells you who was overall the most valuable? Yeah? And the award is supposed to be for the most valuable? Cool. That guy is MVP.

When we start getting into how much fun it is, and the process of the argument, the award ceases to be about the player and starts to be about the writers.

hey guys, remember this line from Russell Carleton's article a few months back?

"there are things that are generally publicly held as sabermetric doctrine—in some cases, crucial underlying assumptions—that are demonstrably false."

the point being, maybe not the best idea to keep all your eggs in the same place.

also, this isn't the 2005 AL Cy Young voting, which was unjustifiable. both players had great seasons, and i'd wonder whether the landslide had more to do with Cabrera making the playoffs, rather than his Triple Crown achievement. regardless, it's not like we'll look back and talk about what an injustice it was that he got the honor.

personally, i'd have voted for Trout, but the way things turned out seems just fine.

Post-season awards have been meaningless for a long time because the votes have been so absurd pretty much since they started awarding them. It's not even worth getting mad over. It's like getting mad over the Oscars.

People like to use Ted Williams as an example of someone who got screwed by the media on MVP votes (finished second both times he won the triple crown) but Lou Gehrig won the triple crown in 1934 and finished ... FIFTH.

The numbers that count aren't the number of awards given by people who often play politics and, as RedsManRick, play to narrative value. Miller is dead-on with point No. 6, too.

Trout's season is Trout's season. Not having the MVP doesn't diminish his greatness or its historical value. We can all give him gold stars and when his career is finished we can add them up.

I'm not even sure the point is "fun," necessarily, though it is definitely that -- angry Angels fans will get to self-righteously chant 'MVP!' every time Trout comes to bat like Dodgers fans and Kemp this past season did, and there's a lot to be said for fans who want to show their solidarity with a player they like. To me, the only point of end-of-the-year voting is to honor the tradition of having end-of-the-year voting. And EOTYV (sick of typing that sorry haha) has always been at its core a manifestation of MLB "culture," for lack of a better word.

It's true the triple crown winner hasn't always been a shoe-in for MVP, but it's important not only to remember how baseball journalism was "back in the day" (kinda mean!), but also that they didn't necessarily have the history or context to value the triple crown as modern writers do.

I do not have a problem with the guy with the highest WAR not winning. The BBWAA writers are entitled to weigh factors however they want; why do we care who this admittedly nigh-meaningless trophy goes to so much?

The best alternative, I think, is to just have Sam Miller or whoever walk up to that podium on MLB Network and deliver the SABR Community Conglomerate Award For Statsiest Guy.