True or false: Justin Verlander should win AL MVP

[byrdz]

Who is they?

Brain fart there. The Jays have no chance of doing that. I had the Rays on the farting brain when I wrote that.

[mweb]

Right or wrong, that HR by Ellsbury may be the difference in the MVP vote. He also hit 2 out in the first game.

[BaltimoreTerp]

Right or wrong, that HR by Ellsbury may be the difference in the MVP vote. He also hit 2 out in the first game.

I don't know. With the way the Red Sox have struggled this month, I find it very hard to believe that the same writers who are willing to punish players like Bautista and Kemp for the play of their teammates are willing to ignore the play of Ellsbury's teammates. That seems a bit hypocritical to me.

[mweb]

I don't know. With the way the Red Sox have struggled this month, I find it very hard to believe that the same writers who are willing to punish players like Bautista and Kemp for the play of their teammates are willing to ignore the play of Ellsbury's teammates. That seems a bit hypocritical to me.

Sure, but I don't expect some of them to make much sense with their thinking. Plus, making the playoffs is what is most important for a lot of these guys, and if the Sox make it, that HR will be viewed as one of the big moments to get them there.

[mweb]

Posnanski on the MVP race.

Some good stuff on what makes or really doesn't make this Verlander season that much different than a normal Cy Young caliber season.

But it’s the second question that is really trying on the soul. It’s so popular to say that Verlander’s season is quantifiably different from that of every other starting pitcher in the last 25 years (none off them won an MVP award). And I am certainly not trying to downplay the greatness of Verlander’s season. I’m a huge fan. But is this year really all that much better than a good Cy Young Award season? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that in many ways we are all falling in exactly the same trap that we supposedly dismantled last year when Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young with only 13 wins. It seems to me that much of the Verlander hype comes from his shiny-looking 24-5 record.

And I’m not diving into deep-sea pitching statistics to make that point. Verlander’s other basic stats — his 2.40 ERA, his 250 strikeouts, even his sparkling .920 WHIP — are not out of line with what the best pitcher in each league tends to do. The average ERA+ for Cy Young winners in the American League the last five years is 170. Verlander’s ERA+ this year: 170.

Johan Santana in 2004 won 20 games, led the league in strikeouts and ERA and had a .921 WHIP — and that was in a much higher run-scoring context. He didn’t get a single first-place MVP vote. Randy Johnson, that same year, had a better ERA+ than Verlander, more strikeouts, a lower WHIP (.900) and he didn’t even win the Cy Young, much less the MVP (yep, there was that 16-14 record). Pedro in 2002 had almost the exact same year that Verlander is having, though admittedly with 50 fewer innings, and he didn’t win the Cy Young. Pedro in 2000 had a year for the ages, a year that even trumps Verlander’s (1.74 ERA, 5.3 hits per nine, .737 WHIP) and he did not get a single MVP vote.

Fangraphs has Verlander well behind Roy Halladay in WAR and tied with CC Sabathia for the lead in WAR among American League pitchers. This generally leads people to say that Fangraphs doesn’t know what the heck it’s talking about. But they build this statistic around the fact that Verlander’s batting average on balls In play is stupefyingly low (.236) and that is at least in part due to luck and the Tigers’ defense.

Whether you buy into that or not, ask yourself this question: Would Verlander be a leading MVP candidate if his record was 19-5? Would he be a leading MVP candidate if you adjust his record just slightly, so it was 23-7?* I don’t know. I really don’t know.

[bdlj0887]

If we're only looking at playoff teams now, I think Cabrera has a good shot. His numbers are actually insane even though his power is "down". He's been ridiculously clutch all year and has an OPS 100 points higher than any other AL playoff-team player. Shrug.

Boston not making the playoffs should expose some of the hypocrisy of people that said only players on playoff teams deserve MVP.