November 13, 2014

BP Unfiltered

The First Thing I Will Look For When MVP Results Are Announced Today

by Sam Miller

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This will be the first time since Ryan Howard's partial rookie season that Chase Utley finishes ahead of him in MVP voting

— Sam Miller (@SamMillerBP) May 24, 2014

Just for the picture-averse, I'll restate: Ryan Howard has never in a season been better (by WARP, or either of the WARs) than Chase Utley; Utley has never finished higher in MVP voting than Howard. Howard has more MVP shares in his career than Chipper Jones did. Utley has roughly as many MVP shares is his career as Howard got in 2008, the year he finished only second.

When I tweeted that thing up there, Utley was hitting .333/.389/.556 and seemed a lock to get at least a single 10th place vote.

@SamMillerBP Sam I swear if you jinx it

— WC Feels (@Hegelbon) May 24, 2014

Will Utley actually get a vote, just one tiny little 10th place vote to finish ahead of Howard? He finished with 4.5 WARP, which is 30th best in baseball. Around 40 position players typically get MVP votes, so you might say, YEAH! But of course the distribution of votes by WARP isn't a smooth slope down. The top 15 or so basically all get votes, so that's 15 spots for 15 players. The next 20 or 25 spots, though, are spread out among the next 100 or so WARP finishers. A season like Utley's could, theoretically, be anywhere from top three to not receiving votes. As an example, here are the 30th-highest-WARP players in each of the past 15 years, with their MVP vote totals:

Considering that a) the Phillies were a funnel of misery this year and b) Utley hardly gets votes when he finishes near the very tippy top of baseball in WARP, the most likely outcome today is probably no votes. And the x-axes of our charts will get one sad face longer.

Sam Miller is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @SamMillerBB
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