As a die-hard fan of major league baseball, I annually find this week to be one of the most frustrating of the year.
Yes, it's early November, but Golden Gloves, Rookies of the Year, Cy Youngs and MVPs are all announced now, and every year, someone who doesn't deserve it takes home one of these prestigious trophies.
It all comes down to nonsense.
Take 2004 for example. Randy Johnson was easily the best pitcher in the league, striking out 290 while compiling a 2.60 ERA and 0.90 WHIP. But he only went 16-14. So Roger Clemens, with his 18-4 record and 1.16 WHIP, received the honor. Maybe that doesn't seem like such a terrible injustice, but in the age of 24/7 sports news and profound statistical data, there's really no reason for it. Wins are the least telling stat about a pitcher; you can't win if your offense doesn't score or the bullpen doesn't hold the lead. And yet, all too often wins seem to determine the Cy Young winner.
Let's move on to '05, when Johan Santana put together this line: 238 K, 2.87 ERA, 0.97 WHIP. But like Johnson, he only "won" 16 games. So 21-game winner Bartolo Colon -- he of 157 Ks, 3.48 ERA and 54-inch waist -- took home the award.
The MVP is even worse. That's because people take far too literally the words "Most Valuable Player." Rather than just giving the award to the best damn player, sportswriters get caught up in the semantics of the phrase "most valuable." What does it mean? How valuable can you be if your team doesn't make the playoffs? How valuable can you really be to your team if it is full of talent?
Think about those questions for a second. You can't win the MVP if your team doesn't perform well, but you also can't win the MVP if your team performs too well. What?! That's simply baffling.
Baseball is a sport with a nine-player lineup, a five-man rotation, a bullpen and a bench. If one good hitter is surrounded by a poor lineup and an even worse rotation, then of course his team isn't going to win games. He can hit 60 or 70 home runs, but if his team's pitchers surrender 200, then it's game over.
On the other side, if there's a 50-HR hitter in a lineup with two other 30 HR hitters, he's going to get bumped down for having good lineup protection. Of course it helps to have good players around you in the lineup; this phenomenon is undeniable, at least to a degree. But just because a superstar is surrounded with talented role players doesn't mean his performance is dependent upon them.
The fact of the matter is that the MVP should be nothing more than an award given to simply the best player in baseball. If we actually wanted to talk about the nature of "value," then not only would we have to examine a player's performance and the record of his team but also his salary and expected contribution to the club at the start of the year. We could even go into jersey sales, attendance figures and how his presence affects the overall profit of the team. Surely this is within the spectrum of value -- it may even be the most literal definition.
So who should receive the awards this year? Tim Lincecum already won the NL Cy Young, as he deserved to, Cliff Lee seems a lock for the AL distinction, and there's finally no one around to rob Albert Pujols of the NL MVP (this really should be his fourth straight).
The AL is more wide open, with Josh Hamilton, Alex Rodriguez, Kevin Youkilis and Carlos Quentin among the potential candidates. I can't say who should definitively win the award -- there are strong arguments for several players, even ones I didn't name above. All I know is this: Baseball writers should vote for the player that they believe had the best individual year, not the "most valuable" to their respective teams.
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David Heck is a junior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
