November 18, 2008
The No Vote
Amalie Benjamin gets Evan Grant's reasons for leaving Dustin Pedroia off his MVP ballot:
"I think the best way for me to sum it up is, in retrospect, obviously I was wrong," Grant said by phone. "My colleagues all, and people I respect an awful lot, thought Dustin deserved to be in the top 5. I had him on my ballot in some scenarios as high as No. 1 late into September. When I looked at the numbers that to me mattered most, OPS and batting average with runners in scoring position, he just didn't stack up with Youkilis at all. He was a laggard behind the others who had great years in the American League. Is it an error of omission that he's left off my ballot entirely? You could say that."
This wasn't as bad as the person who left Pedro off the ballot in 1999, and his reasoning is pretty sound. However, he also voted Mauer 8th, so maybe his overall reasoning isn't so sound.
Posted by David Pinto at
10:40 PM
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"OPS and batting average with runners in scoring position" is quite the pairing. One of the best sabermetric-era measures of offensive performance, along with one of the most overhyped, old-school, small-sample-size-prone stats of all. And, to judge from Grant's low placement of both Mauer and Pedroia, he's not taking defensive value into account at all. Given the quantity of information available to baseball writers these days, it's a flawed ballot to say the least.
I don't have too much of a problem with a writer valuing one thing over another (OPS vs. total hits). But still, with an overwhelming consensus for #1 and leaving that guy off the ballot altogether, yes that is a mistake.
I don't have a big problem with using RISP numbers for the MVP vote; the point is to determine who had the most valuable season, not who is most likely to repeat that season again next year. In prospective analyis, BA and RISP numbers are near meaningless. But in an MVP analysis, they do differentiate between players over the course of a single season. Just because RISP isn't a repeatable skill doesn't mean it does not have value.
That said, I think Pedroia, while maybe not the best player in the AL, was one of a handful of the best players. My vote would have gone to Mauer.
