Throwing Away MVP Votes

After seeing the story that Ryan Braun tested positive for PEDs, I got to looking at the baseball-reference.com page for MVP voting, mostly to confirm what I thought I remembered: That Matt Kemp was the runner-up. I ended up leaving that window open and looking at stuff in other tabs, just because I’m a bit of a tab-whore with Google Chrome (often having 4-5 open even when most of them are things I haven’t looked at for hours). When I was closing each tab later, I took one more look at the voting and thought about how ridiculous some of the lower-level votes were, like how Ryan Howard of the 2.7 WAR in 2011 was 10th and how someone cast a vote for Cubs E-6 Starlin Castro.

I was curious how often the sportswriters do a terrible job of voting for players, especially players who have no business being in the t10 for voting overall or those players who end up with 1 or 2 points because the beat writer that somehow got a vote decided to reward the guy who’s had a good year and always gives him a good interview.

I realized that Starlin Castro is a relative stud compared to some of the players that were given votes by random writers, and that on a rare occasion, someone with a huge season (measured by WAR) was rewarded with virtually no MVP votes.

The worst (at least by my subjective opinion--going back to 1990)

Several of these players seem to be the “big name” who has a bad year or starts to decline, and apparently no one notices. Tejada in 2009 failed to hit for an OPS of .800 even (.795), only hit 14 home runs, but had a renaissance year for batting average, which must have fooled someone, hitting .313 for the season. That is apparently enough to qualify for be the 23rd best player in baseball that year.

Scott Eyre was another one that baffled me. He was a middle reliever, who at 1.7 WAR actually was a decent reliever. However, he wasn’t a closer and was on a 3rd place team to earn his 1 vote. So according one writer that year, there were only 9 players more valuable than a middle reliever who pitched 68 innings for a 3rd place team.

There were two players that seem to consistently fool the voters on their true value. Most notably is Dante Bichette. He consistently was worth about 0.5-1.0 WAR but regularly got votes, including a 2nd place finish in 1995 where he was basically of the same value to his team as any random player a team might call up from AAA, having only 0.3 WAR. The other is Ryan Howard, who is more valuable than Bichette, but who has a 10th place finish with 2.0 wins and a 2nd place finish with 2.8 wins. In 2008, when he finished 2nd with that 2.8, Berkman had 6.7 WAR for the hapless Astros, David Wright 6.1 for the Mets, and Hanley Ramirez a runner-up worthy 7.6 WAR (which placed him 11th). If you think it’s all about the big name, Chipper Jones had a strong year with 6.6 wins for 12th place (although he only played 128 for those wins, as opposed to Howard, who was apparently slightly above average for the Phillies all year long, playing in every game). Of course, Howard that year did play for the 1st place Phillies, which does explain some of the bias towards him. Not nearly as egregious, even when Howard won the MVP, he won it with 5.8 WAR, which was considerably behind 2nd and 4th place finishers Albert Pujols (8.3 WAR) and Carlos Beltran (8.0 WAR).

The best two though to me are the two players that, according to WAR, were actually a DETRIMENT to their teams and were still considered one of the 10 most valuable players in the league by at least one sportswriter. Tony Womack had a .700 OPS in 1997 and apparently was only really valuable because of the 60 stolen bases he had, as none of his other statistics are impressive in any way. Joe Carter was actually worse and got even more votes, earning 7 points, meaning either someone gave him a 4th place vote or multiple people voted for him. He hit .232 and had an OPS of .681 that year, which, fun enough, if you cloned him and put 9 Joe Carters in a lineup that year in the NL, they would have been the 3rd worst offense in the NL, ahead of only Houston and San Francisco.

The amazing thing to me about this is that most of these characters didn’t even come from particularly good teams. I understand the idea that many writers want to pick a player from a winning team, hence why Braun was voted MVP this year over Matt Kemp, who had a statistically superior season. That, however, isn’t even the case in any of these examples except Ryan Howard’s 2nd place finish.

I fully acknowledge that simply looking at WAR for the season is overly simplistic and cannot tell the entire story, especially if you believe in the idea that some players shrink from pressure while others become more clutch (the Derek Jeter argument, basically), but ultimately I found this interesting, since I would doubt anyone here would dismiss WAR when the numbers are as skewed as they are in some of these cases, like Womack or Carter who were statistically hurting their teams being given votes as being one of the 10 best players in the league in their respective years.