The ever-changing meaning of MVP

There are three stages to this process: First stage, we debate the MVP candidates as the season winds down, until something like a consensus emerges. Second stage, just after the season ends, some writers will stare at blank ballots for somewhere between one and 360 minutes. Many will come to the same conclusions that we all did; some will not; all will vote; democracy will flourish. Third stage, the results will be announced, and woe to the voters who ignored our mandate, for they will be scorched by our collective fury.

What makes this year unusual is that the consensus is forming around Clayton Kershaw. It’s not an original thought to point out that the middle word in Most Valuable Player is squishy and provokes different readers toward radically different directions. But in cases like this, we realize how squishy the third word is, too: Player. We should, I suppose, just thank God above that we all pretty much know what “most” means.

When stage three arrives and somebody has left Kershaw off his ballot or too many have dropped him out of the top spot, and in the possible event that Kershaw doesn’t even win the thing, we will want to blame the writers who refused to take a pitcher seriously. (Alternatively, some of us will dismiss the groupthink consensus that did.) But don’t get distracted. Don’t assume you had the right answer and somebody had the wrong answer. Instead, focus on the one who really brought us to this point, here in 2014, where we still have no idea what writers are actually voting on and yet we expect some “right” answer to be clear to them all:

Blame Bud Selig.

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It’s not the biggest issue on Selig’s plate, and the stakes are incredibly low, but you’d have to say that one of his clearest failures—and, again, that word probably comes across as way too strong, but it’s descriptive—during Selig’s commissionership is the 15-year stagnation of the Hank Aaron Award. Launched in 1999 to recognize the best offensive player in the league—an award that one would reasonably say intends to be the Cy Young Award, but for hitters—the award has gone through no fewer than six different selection processes:

And now it’s almost impossible to tell from MLB’s press releases how the award is chosen: “A special panel of Hall of Fame players led by Aaron will join fans in voting for the award.” No mention of what the HOF players’ role actually is, or how a winner is actually determined. It’s not clear whether Roberto Alomar is just sitting at his computer furiously clicking “reload” on the ballot page. Regardless, you’d better be careful: For all we know, you might be casting a ballot right this very second and you don’t even know it.

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So why does this matter? Let me take you there.

The MVP award is not like any other award. The Cy Young award is seen by most as the award for the best pitcher. How they determine who that is varies from person to person, but the definition itself is rarely disputed. The Gold Gloves are generally seen by most as the award for the best fielders, the Silver Sluggers as the award for the best hitters at each position, the Rolaids Relief Man goes to the man the voters think is the best relief man. The voters get these things wrong, all the time, but they don’t get them wrong because they’re disputing whether the guy needs to play on a winning team or whether his role in the clubhouse matters or whether performance during the second half is more important than the first or whether he stepped up and changed positions when the team needed him to. We know what these awards are. They’re for the best.

The MVP has never been that. It has been, instead, a glimpse into the soul of the era. It reflects what each generation of writers wants to reward, and so we see these humps in the MVP topography where the fault lines push up against each other and create hills and valleys. In the early 1930s, for instance, it felt sometimes like the writers just went down the list of middle infielders to fill in their ballots, as in the 1933 NL vote:

In the 30s and 40s, the catcher of a winning team was all but assured a high finish. In a 10-year-period from 1935 to 1944, three-quarters of the starting catchers for pennant winning teams finished in the top 15. (Another finished 17th). In the post-War era, you got votes if you were just generally on a pennant winner, regardless of position: It was not uncommon to see nine players from a single pennant-winning team get votes. In 1949, to pick one year, the Red Sox and Yankees fought to the wire. The top seven players in the MVP vote that year were on one of the two teams.

There was the relief pitcher era of the early 1980s (Dan Quisenberry and Bruce Sutter received more MVP votes in their careers than Chase Utley and Carlos Beltran). There was the unrestrained home run lust of the 1990s, when sluggers got votes no matter how suspicious the source of their power. (I speak, of course, about Dante Bichette’s Denver-aided homers.) And now we’re in… well, now it appears that we’re in the era of statistical precision, or at least what many consider to be the era of statistical precision. That means that, more than any other era, the players who get MVP votes are the best players in the game, per WAR. Whether that’s because voters are taking advantage of having more information packaged neatly into WAR (somewhat likely) or that they place a higher value on statistically measurable things (also somewhat likely), the result is that the MVP votes tell a story about this era, about the generation, about the spread of data.

Among the players who got at least one vote last year, the correlation between WAR and total votes was a robust .61. Compare that to snap shots from previous decades:

2013: .61
2003: .51
1993: .41
1983: .47
1973: .42
1963: .38

(That’s a complete junk stat. Don’t look at it. But still, kind of interesting!)

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With one exception: pitching. Pitching still doesn’t get credited. Kershaw is going to be the first NL pitcher since Bob Gibson, 46 years ago, to win the award. (Three AL starters have won it in the 45 years since then.) It used to get credited, if not quite equally—for the first few decades of the MVP award, roughly a fifth went to starting pitchers, so it’s not as though the “not on the field every day” always excluded them. But in the past four decades only two starting pitchers have won the MVP award. As Joe Posnanski wrote a couple years ago, it’s harder for a pitcher to merit it in the current era, as pitchers now throw 230 innings instead of 330. But that’s not nearly enough to explain it; pitchers led the NL in WAR in 2010 and 2011, for instance, and Kershaw out-WAR’d the winner, Andrew McCutchen last year (but finished just seventh). But to say that pitchers are undervoted doesn’t really give you a sense of how undervoted, so here we go:

In the past four seasons, 55 position players have produced 6+ WAR in a season. Of those 55, all but two got MVP votes, and 45 of them (81 percent) finished in the top 10.

Now pitchers: In the same time period, 25 pitchers have produced 6+ WAR in a season. Of that group, eight failed to get a single MVP vote, and only five (20 percent) finished in the top 10.

So it’s obvious that the real demerit assigned to pitchers is that “they have their own award.” And it’s true. They have their own award. The MVP instructions are very clear that they should be considered, and the idea of “value” as most of us interpret it these days suggests very strongly that they should win it every few years at least, and the salaries that teams give them very, very, very strongly suggest they cover any reasonable minimum for “value” that it takes to match a star position player. But, alas, they have their own award.

Which brings us to the Hank Aaron Award. In 1999, Pedro Martinez has quite possibly the best pitching season ever for a starter. He lost the MVP award because two voters left him off their ballots entirely. “MVP is for everyday players,” one of the omitters said. “Pitchers have their own award.”

That happened to be the first year of the Hank Aaron Award. Hitters, for the first time, had their own award. Nobody cared about it, though, and nobody still cares about it. Somebody will leave Kershaw off a ballot this year, or at the very least will put Kershaw sixth or eighth of something absurd. Without that award taking over the burden of naming the best hitter in baseball (objectively speaking), we instead put the burden on the MVP award to name the best hitter in baseball (objectively speaking). Would that we didn’t have to.

What we’d have in the perfect world is this: A Cy Young award. And a Hank Aaron Award that people cared about. It would be intuitive. The voting would be transparent. The winners would be consistently meritorious. It would be more than some MLB press release. Once we have that, we’d have equilibrium. We’d have an objective award for pitchers, and an objective award for hitters, and the MVP award would be free to be what it has always been: The BBWAA waxing philosophical about what Means Something, sometimes getting absurd and sometimes staying on point, sometimes picking pitchers and sometimes picking middle infielders and sometimes picking sluggers and sometimes picking grit machines, but always doing more than just sorting some statistical leaderboard.