Before we talk about Justin Verlander, I do want to mention a few pitchers in the other league.
How Valuable Is Justin Verlander?
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People on the street ask me, “Rob! Why do you care who wins the Cy Young Award?”
I care because you care. Many of you, anyway.
I also care because the results of the Cy Young balloting are instructive; they help us get into the heads of the voters, and I find those heads terribly interesting. Now, this is more true about the MVP Award than the Cy Young; the latter is largely predictable purely through the numbers, while the former seems to have more room for twists and turns and highly specious “logic”.
But I digress. I also care because there are measures of drama and uncertainty involved, which I also find terribly interesting. This season, the Cy Young in the American League looked mostly done a month (or more) ago. But the National League's been completely different, with Roy Halladay looking like the best candidate for most of the season, but hardly the only candidate. Ian Kennedy winning his 20th game threw a spanner into the works, and Cliff Lee's weekly shutouts also complicate things. At this point, though, it looks like a battle between Halladay and Clayton Kershaw, and even today I think it's still wide open; if Kershaw beat the Giants Tuesday night, he'll have 20 wins to Halladay's 18, and perhaps a slightly lower ERA. Kershaw will also have more strikeouts than Halladay.
Of course, Halladay will get bonus points for pitching for the National League’s best team, and he’ll probably get bonus points for being Roy Halladay, and he should get bonus points for pitching against tougher hitters in a less pitcher-friendly ballpark. He should get bonus points for his superior strikeout-to-walk ratio, too.
Bottom line, Halladay’s probably the better pitcher and he’s probably pitched slightly better this season. But this might be really close, coming down to each pitcher’s last couple of starts. Which is really interesting.
There’s no such drama in the American League. Not with Justin Verlander sitting on 24 wins.
It wouldn’t be baseball without miniature controversies, though, and this season’s controversy revolves around Verlander’s worthiness (or not) for the bigger trophy: Most Valuable Player.
Most Valuable Player
There’s one practical issue here: pitchers just don’t win MVP Awards anymore. Bob Nightengale (via USA Today):
Pitchers have become as forgotten as bullpen cars in MVP voting since the dawn of the offense-dominated steroid era. Oakland Athletics closer Dennis Eckersley was the last of 20 pitchers to win an MVP, in 1992; no starter has won since the Boston Red Sox's Roger Clemens in 1986, the longest pitcher drought since the first MVPs were awarded in 1911. No pitcher has finished in the top three since Pedro Martinez was second in 1999.
"I just don't think a pitcher should win unless he's breaking records or putting up Bob Gibson numbers," says TBS analyst John Smoltz, the 1996 NL Cy Young winner, who was 11th in MVP balloting. " I don't think voters will go with a pitcher who goes once every five days."
Smoltz won 24 games in 1996, for a Braves squad that finished eight games ahead of the second-place Expos. He led the National League in strikeouts and innings. But his ERA ranked just fourth, and (in retrospect) his Wins Above Replacement just third among pitchers. I suspect that if Smoltz had led the league in ERA, he would have gotten more support. But his 11th-place finish obviously suggests that the great majority of voters just didn't take him seriously.
Fittingly, Smoltz was ninth in WAR. Ken Caminiti, who finished fourth in WAR -- again, nobody knew this then -- was the unanimous MVP, beating out Barry Bonds, Jeff Bagwell and Bernard Gilkey (third in WAR, 14th in MVP balloting).
But I digress.
The point is that while MVP voters used to be perfectly willing to vote for pitchers, they’re really not anymore. No pitcher has come particularly close since 1999, when ... well, you know what happened in 1999, right?
This year's AL MVP debate may be the hottest since 1999, says Jack O'Connell, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association of America whose members cast the votes.
It was 12 years ago that Martinez went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts for the Boston Red Sox. Yet, he finished second to Texas catcher Pudge Rodriguez, who hit .332 with 35 homers and 113 RBI. Two writers left Martinez off their MVP balloting, although both would have had to vote Martinez fourth or better for him to win the award.
Both of those writers should have disqualified themselves from voting, or been disqualified afterward from voting in future elections. But, whatever. Now it’s just another interesting bit of history.
Anyway, today Bob Ryan weighed in:
Justin Verlander will win the American League Cy Young Award. If there is any justice, the vote will be unanimous.
But many people, and not just Tigers boosters, want more. They want the whole enchilada. They want Justin Verlander to become the first starting pitcher to win an MVP since Roger Clemens a quarter-century ago.
I hate this. It’s a conversation we should not be having. Pitchers should be content with the Cy Young. And I’ll take it a step further. Relievers should not be eligible for the Cy Young. They should be competing for what I would call the Hoyt Wilhelm Award, a special prize for the best reliever of the year. This, by the way, would be a totally subjective award that would not be based simply on someone’s save total.
As much as I love Hoyt Wilhelm, that’s a lousy name for this award because the guys who would win the award would be performing in completely different roles than Wilhelm. Since it’s hard to see a return to the days of top relievers routinely pitching two or three innings at a clip, wouldn’t it make sense to name the award after a modern reliever who’s typically pitched one inning at a time? Wouldn’t it make sense to call it the Mariano Rivera Award?
I’m in favor of such an award. If MVP voters won’t for starting pitchers, there should be an award for starting pitchers. Which there is. If Cy Young voters won’t vote for relief pitchers, they should have an award for relief pitchers. Which there isn’t. There’s the Rolaids Award, but that’s lame because of the name and also because it’s purely objective, based purely on statistics.
Leaving the voters’ actual preferences aside, should Verlander be considered seriously by the MVP voters?
According to FanGraphs, Verlander's been good for 7 Wins Above Replacement. That's really good, about the same as CC Sabathia (7.1) but behind four American League hitters: Jacoby Ellsbury, Jose Bautista, Dustin Pedroia and Curtis Granderson.
According to Baseball-Reference.com, though? Verlander’s tied for first with Bautista, and well ahead of everyone else in the American League.
People like me (or sort of like me) have been accused of “just wanting to have one number that determines everything.”
Uh, no. People like me find one number, and that leads to another number which leads to another number, and we stop finding numbers only when time demands it. If I had an MVP ballot, I would certainly consider Verlander among the best candidates. I would start with the various WARs, then start drilling deeper and look at things like leverage, quality of competition, etc.
I like Bob Ryan, but Bob Ryan is absolutely wrong about Justin Verlander and the MVP Award. I wouldn’t be incensed if pitchers were made ineligible for the MVP Award; frankly, a lot of voters just can’t handle the complexities involved with the current setup. But pitchers are eligible; they are expressly eligible. And it’s my personal opinion that if pitchers are eligible, a voter is duty-bound to consider pitchers, making at least some attempt to place pitchers into the same context as hitters.
And the context really doesn’t have to be all that complicated. The goal of any sports team is to win games. Ideally the last game of the year, but there’s definitely a great deal of value in winning games before the last game. If Justin Verlander does more to win games than Jose Bautista or Jacoby Ellsbury, then Justin Verlander is the league’s most valuable player.
Mine, anyway.
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