From The Windup: What Exactly Is an MVP?

From the Windup is FanHouse's daily, extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.

One of the great things about baseball is that a hundred different people can have a hundred different opinions on one particular player. Go ahead and ask ten of your friends who the best player in baseball is, and you're likely to get five to 10 different answers.

Yet at the end of every season MLB hands out awards to players proclaiming them the best in a particular area. There's the Cy Young Award for pitchers, the Gold Gloves for defense, and of course, there's the MVP award that's handed out in each league to the player deemed to be the most valuable.

The problem with this, though, is that nobody is exactly sure what MVP means. We know it stands for Most Valuable Player, and we know that most means having more of something than any other. We also know that player means guy who wears a uniform and swings a bat or throws a ball.

When it comes to the word valuable, though, there are a million different ways somebody can go when figuring out what it means. According to Webster's, valuable means "having monetary value" or "worth a good price." It can also mean "having desirable or esteemed characteristics or qualities" or being of "great use and service."

So it should be pretty easy, after all, all we have to do is find the guy who wears a uniform and swings a bat or throws a ball who has great monetary value at a good price, while having desirable or esteemed characteristics and is of great use and service.

So why the hell is it so hard to figure out who the MVP is?


Now, I'm not here to talk about who I think the MVP in each league is. I just want to figure out how we determine who that player is. The reason I want to do this is because last weekend I received a message on my Facebook page (I knew there was a reason I had one) from ESPN's Keith Law. After reading about how I thought Carlos Quentin should be the American League MVP (before Quentin went down for the year, obviously), Keith was pretty sure I had taken the brown acid again.

"Leaving aside the fact that he might be out for the year," said Law, "are you serious? He's not one of the five most valuable players in the AL this year. He's only 7th among hitters in VORP, and that's before factoring in defense (his is bad; he's behind [Grady] Sizemore and A-Rod, who are both very good) or considering pitchers ([Cliff]Lee and [Roy] Halladay have both been more valuable). In fact, A-Rod has him in both OBP and SLG, before we even consider positional value or defense. I just don't get it."

I then tried to explain to Keith that I believed Carlos was the league's MVP because he had literally carried the White Sox on his back for the first few months of the season while the rest of the lineup struggled, and that without him, the White Sox would probably be a lot closer to Detroit and Cleveland right now rather than the Minnesota Twins.

Of course, this brings me to my first point about how we choose whom our MVPs are: statistics. It's a lot easier to go online and look up a player's numbers than it is to watch him play every single day, particularly when your job requires that you follow a lot of different teams. Still, at the same time, statistics alone should never dictate who is seen as the best player.

The reason for this is because statistics are misleading. They only tell a fraction of the story. For instance, take a look at what Brandon Webb said about a pitcher's win total.

"The thing with wins is we've got no control. You could have a 1.00 ERA but if your team doesn't score, you're going to go 0-30. It's not something you control. That's why the wins and losses are skewed."

It works the same way for hitters as well, with things like home runs and RBI. A guy can hit 55 home runs in a season, but if 49 of them came with nobody on and his team down by six runs, are they really that valuable to the team? It may help their run differential, but it sure doesn't do anything for them in the standings.

So while statistics are a valuable tool to use in helping determine how good or valuable a player is, they should not be the only factor in deciding.

Which leads to the next debate amongst writers and fans alike when it comes to choosing this award: Should the MVP come from a winning team? There isn't a rule that says they have to be, and players like Andre Dawson have won the award while playing on a team that finished in last place. Some, like Baseball Prospectus' Will Carroll, think that the overall performance of a team a player is on should have no impact whatsoever on whether or not that player is the most valuable.

"For me, it's about the best player, period," said Carroll. "I try not to focus on any one stat, even the advanced ones, but I use them to try and make an informed judgment. The biases for things like RBI and 'clutch' drive me nuts, while the bias against bad teams does the same.

"The top four players in either league are NL guys on mediocre teams (per VORP) and in the AL, we're talking about Nos. 7, 10, and 15 as the favorites. I'm not going to argue for Aubrey Huff, but why not A-Rod? [Matt] Holliday's as good this year as last, but no one's talking about him as anything other than a trade target."

The counter-argument to this theory, though, is that how valuable can a guy really be if his team is losing? In my conversation with Keith Law, he made it apparent that Grady Sizemore is his clear-cut choice to be MVP because he's the best player in the AL this season. I agree with Keith's assessment on Grady's talent, but just because you're the best player does not make you the most valuable in my opinion.

Even though Grady is having a fantastic season for the Indians, it hasn't done anything to help them compete with the White Sox and Twins in the AL Central. If you took Grady off the Indians, what's the worst thing that would happen? They'd finish in fourth instead of third? How devastating.

After all, as Webster's said earlier, valuable can be quantified with money. Well, how much money has Grady's season made for the Cleveland Indians? They're currently 22nd in baseball in attendance with an average of 26,925 (which is only 62.1 percent of Jacobs Field's capacity) this season. Plus, let's not ignore the fact that a player who carries the load and helps get his team into the postseason will be helping his team make even more money.

The deeper his team gets into the playoffs, the more home games for which his team will be able to sell tickets.

So, by using that argument, it becomes apparent that a player who leads his team to the playoffs is more valuable than one who leads them to third place. Of course, as with everything else in life, there's an exception to this rule. For the last few years the San Francisco Giants have been one of the worst teams in baseball, yet you could argue that Barry Bonds was more valuable than any other player in the National League, because Giants fans still showed up at the ball park to see him play.

Had Barry not been on the team the last few years, the Giants may have averaged only 15,000 people per game. Looking at the numbers now we see that attendance at Giants games has dropped from an average of 39,792 in 2007 to 35,391 in 2008. Over the course of an entire season, that's 356,481 tickets the Giants didn't sell this year. Factor in that the average price of a ticket to AT&T Park is $63.50, and that means the Giants have lost out on $22,636,543 thanks to Barry's "retirement." Players just don't get more valuable than that, and that doesn't even include all the money the Giants lose out on when it comes to Barry Bonds jersey and t-shirt sales.

One of the final issues that people squabble over when it comes to the MVP award is whether pitchers should be considered. Again, there is no rule in the criteria that says they're not eligible, but some feel that they shouldn't be involved.

I'm on the fence with this one. I understand the argument that pitchers already have their own award with the Cy Young, but the MVP is for the most valuable player, not the most valuable position player. Plus, as our own Jon Bois points out, just because a pitcher generally only plays every five days, it doesn't mean he's doing any less than his teammates.

"It's pretty ridiculous. If a pitcher starts every fifth day, he stays in for six to seven innings, and his WHIP is, say, 1.2, that means he plays a central role in about 25 plays per five days. If a position player starts every game for five days, between his plate appearances and his central role in defensive plays, he takes a central role in about...25 or 30 plays, right? Surely not much more than that? And shouldn't we give the pitcher a little credit for doing all his work in a single day?"

Exactly, just as long as they don't give it to a closer. I'm sorry Francisco Rodriguez, I don't care if you pick up 80 saves this season, you don't deserve the award. All you do is come on for an inning every other day or so and finish what everybody else started. In the wild, they would call you a scavenger.

So, after all this, we still really don't know what an MVP is, do we? In the end, Pat Lackey may have the best explanation as for what the MVP is.

"[The] MVP is a million different things defined and redefined on a whim by the media that votes on it every year. Some years it's a 'clutch' player. Some years it's the best player on a good team. Some years it's a guy that had an
awesome year. It's incredibly arbitrary, which drives me insane and leads me to actually care very little about it any more."

To be fair, ever since Pat's pet gerbil Nibbles McGee passed a few weeks ago, he hasn't cared about anything, not just the MVP.

So based on my beliefs, and the beliefs of the others I queried on the topic, who would be my picks for MVP this year? I haven't the slightest idea, in fact, I'm more confused now than when I started writing this.