It’s MLB Awards Season: Baseball’s Deserving MVP, Cy Young, And Rookie Of The Year Winners

Every November, the baseball world reconciles itself with the fact that we have all watched the same thing, three hours nearly every day, for the last seven months, and we still can’t agree on what the Hell it is we’ve been staring at. We all agree that first base is 90 feet from home plate (I disagree!!!), but as soon as there are no immovable, explicit rules to guide us, leaving us to our own devices, we can’t agree on whether pitching wins are irrelevant or fundamentally important, how damaging strikeouts are, or, really, the definition of value itself as applied to baseball.

This all comes to a head when and because we hand out awards. Who was the best? Who was the most [this]? These are questions we understandably feel the need to answer; the problem is that, no, we haven’t been seeing the same thing.

Back to pitching wins. The general consensus among baseball smartypants is that pitching wins don’t tell us much about a pitcher’s actual value. I’m in this camp. They aren’t predictive. If I were to acquire my own franchise and build my own roster, wins are numbers I would rarely if ever bother to glance at.

But hold on a moment. Let’s not dismiss the wins crowd as readily as we normally do. These folks over here, they aren’t necessarily concerned with predictive numbers. They simply want to know who is the best. In baseball, the best outcome is winning. The starting pitcher who takes the mound, they believe, is responsible for that game’s outcome. He is his team’s steward for the day. Like the captain of a submarine, his team’s fate is his own fate in every sense that matters. Pitching wins aren’t secondary statistics floating somewhere off in the periphery. They’re the very objective itself; statistics such as ERA are helpful indicators of how it happened.

This is all an aside, as I intend here to draw up baseball’s deserving award winners from my own perspective, one chiseled out by years of watching the game, reading statistics, and perhaps more importantly, reading the words of smartypants whose pants are smarter than mine.

Honestly, I wouldn’t take issue if any of these three fellows received the MVP award. Your opinion on this matter, I think, will tell you an especially great deal about your idea of baseball value. It says a lot about mine, anyway. Here is a chart, because this is the Internet:

Concerning MVP award, this is a rough representation of what drives my opinion. 85% is based on statistics, which, frankly, wouldn’t require me to see or hear anything about baseball all season. The 7.5% “playoffs” slice takes into account whether the player’s team made the playoffs as well as how well he actually played in the postseason. And the remaining slice is simple sentiment -- what is this guy’s personal story? Do I want to see him get a trophy? Was he responsible for any particularly memorable moments this season?

Felix Hernandez is my Cy Young winner (spoilers!!!). Miguel Cabrera’s numbers at the plate are slightly better than Josh Hamilton’s, and Cabrera made 77 more plate appearances to boot. But the Rangers made their first playoff appearance in their 50-year history largely by virtue of their hitting, and their best hitter was Josh Hamilton, who remains one of baseball’s most intriguing stories. See, there’s the sentiment I was talking about.

This is a drag. I’m sorry. I like Pujols, but he’s a boring MVP pick -- indeed, this would be his third consecutive MVP award and the fourth of his career. Meanwhile, Votto further cemented his status as one of the very best hitters in the game while leading the surprising Reds past Pujols’ Cardinals and into the playoffs for the first time in 15 years.

The two hitters are essentially in a dead heat when it comes to the stat I look at first, OPS+. However, Pujols did lead the league in home runs and RBI. Had he not posted the lowest average of his career -- an inexcusable .312 -- he would have had a very good shot at winning the first Triple Crown in over 40 years.

Leading the league in RBI, for example, isn’t predictive of a player’s actual value, but it is an accomplishment. And while the Cardinals’ NL Central lead eroded in August, Pujols wasn’t really to blame; in fact, he began to turn on the jets that month.

Winner
Felix Hernandez, Mariners -- 1.057 WHIP, 232 strikeouts, led league in innings pitched (249.2), ERA (2.27), and hits per nine innings (7.0)

Finally, here’s a relatively easy call. We’re clearly far removed from 2007, when no Cy-eligible starting pitcher in the American League could manage an ERA of under 3, but Felix Hernandez’s season is the standout. Yes, Clay Buchholz does trump him in ERA+, but Hernandez pitched over 75 more innings than Buchholz.

Felix should win the Cy, but I have this nagging feeling that he won’t. His ERA was 2.84 in early August, and he lowered it to 2.27 by recording an unbelievable 0.96 ERA over his final ten starts, when the Mariners were well out of contention. Some voters will trot out the old Great Pitchers Pitch Great In Big Games idea, but I can’t be convinced that he simply can’t pitch in big games. Most likely, it just took him a couple of months to acquire top form. If the Mariners could have found a way to contend, these folks would be saying the opposite about him.

Winner
Roy Halladay, Phillies -- League-leading 250.2 innings pitched, 2.44 ERA, 231 strikeouts, led league with 7.30 strikeout/walk ratio

My first instinct was to give my imaginary Cy Young Award to Josh Johnson -- after all, he led the league in ERA, and I’d really like to give a nod to the perennially over-achieving Marlins. The problem, though, was this: 183.2 innings pitched is certainly what I’d call a full season, but reminiscent of the Hernandez/Buchholtz debate, Roy Halladay threw nearly 70 more innings than Johnson. That, in my opinion, excuses an extra 14 ERA points.

Halladay was also the most exciting pitcher in either league this season. He threw the 20th perfect game in baseball history, pitched the second postseason no-hitter in baseball history, and recorded a 7.3 strikeout-to-walk ratio, the 19th-best in baseball history.

He’ll probably get the award because he has a lot of wins.

Neftali Feliz should win this in a walk, and it’s sort of disconcerting that the players voted in favor of Austin Jackson. Jackson had a fine rookie season and has big things ahead of him, but Feliz’s contributions to the AL champion Rangers were indispensable. A 22-year-old stepping into the closer’s role, recording 40 saves for a surprising World Series team, and allowing just one run through seven World Series innings is not something we see very often.

Also deserving of shout-outs: Indians catcher Carlos Santana, who made the most of his limited number of plate appearances, and Danny Valencia, a well-rounded third baseman who figures to be a fixture for the Twins in coming years.

This is the most star-studded rookie class I’ve ever seen, which makes this choice nearly impossible. Over the past few hours, I wrote up an argument for Jason Heyward as Rookie of the Year and scrapped it. Then I half-wrote an argument for Jaime Garcia and scrapped it. I wanted to defy the popular consensus of the moment and avoid casting my invisi-vote for Buster Posey.

Garcia was absolutely unbelievable over the first two months of the season, managing a 1.32 ERA through his first ten starts. As the Cardinals began to regress, though, so did Garcia, and the team ultimately decided to shut him down in mid-September for precautionary reasons.

Posey trumps them both. This reasoning is admittedly somewhat crude, but consider this: Posey’s offensive Wins Above Replacement is scored a 3.0. If the Giants won three fewer games, they would have missed the playoffs entirely. But they did reach the playoffs and won the World Series, thanks in large part to their pitching staff. A pitching staff, in turn, owes some of its success to its catcher.

It’s quite a rare thing, seeing a closer who just won the World Series jump into the arms of a 23-year-old rookie catcher. It happened, and Buster Posey played a large part in making it so.