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What More Does Mike Trout Have To Do?

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miguelcabrera

New member
Nov 20, 2008
11,381
0
YOU KNOW
cabrera shoulda won it the year morneau won it and the year hamilton won it, and he will win it again next year

he should have 5 MVPs

best player ever
 

Super Mario

Well-known member
Mar 1, 2009
18,242
85
Mushroom Kingdom
best player ever

350x263px-99303658_calm-down.jpeg
 

cards01fan

New member
Sep 4, 2008
345
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I think the biggest problem is the lack of clarity in the voting guidelines. As it stands you could vote for reasonably anyone. Some years you gotta be on a playoff team some years you don't.
 

Jaypers

Well-known member
Aug 7, 2008
48,898
1,380
IL
So, what am i missing...

Can someone actually make a solid case for how Trout should have won the MVP? Like with stats and junk...


Mike Trout, baseball's best player, deserved MVP once again over Miguel Cabrera
By Jeff Passan | Yahoo Sports – 14 hours ago

The dregs of the Internet exist for days like Thursday. In the kingdom of sports, the phylum of baseball, the class of awards, the order of opinion, the family of fan and the genus of obnoxious exists the most horrid species in the sports-viewing universe: trollus mvpus.

I wanted to take the higher road on this. Honestly. I wanted to preach détente among baseball fans, to proffer this idea of harmonious coexistence between the parties that have turned Miguel Cabrera vs. Mike Trout into the argument that never ends. Considering I have fire-hosed lighter fluid on the debate, I realize that I, too, have contributed my fair share to the quarrel. I was ready to apologize and sing "Kumbaya" and agree to disagree.


Then Cabrera romped to a second straight American League MVP triumph over Trout – this one even more decisive than in 2012. And the realization washed over me that in this age of great knowledge, when a surfeit of information about a player's true value exists – especially how to assess a player's contributions and why past follies should be buried there – a large group either blinds itself to such details or is left blind by a voting system that must evolve to match the breadth of our knowledge.

This is not just a nod in the direction of my Baseball Writers Association of America brethren, who lavished Cabrera with 23 of 30 first-place votes to Trout's five (with one apiece going to Chris Davis and Josh Donaldson). Some very intelligent, thoughtful, deliberate, considerate people still found reason to place Cabrera atop their ballot – people who understand the game well enough to realize that despite superior hitting numbers, Cabrera cannot stack up to Trout when factoring in baserunning, fielding and positional value.


Mike Trout is a way better defensive player than Miguel Cabrera. (AP Photo) In which case it's time for the BBWAA to consider killing its woefully outdated and dithering criteria – seriously, it asks voters to name a player most valuable when it says, in the letter sent to voters, "There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means" – and awarding the thing to its rightful owner: the best player in each league, because he who plays the game best is the apotheosis of value.

Miguel Cabrera was baseball's best hitter in 2013. Mike Trout was baseball's best player in 2013.

Of course, should one spelunk into the comments sections of any Cabrera-vs.-Trout story, the Twitter @ replies to any of the five Trout voters (including Yahoo's own Tim Brown, who had the pleasure of reading this doozy) or any of the myriad bridges under which trollus mvpus plants itself, an ugly truth will reveal itself. It is the same thing that festers in politics, actually, and turns what should be a marketplace of ideas into a swap meet of idiocy.

Willful ignorance is an embarrassment; trollus mvpus celebrates it. Being informed as to the new methodologies of determining value should be a pre-requisite to forming an opinion; trollus mvpus thinks pre-reqs are for losers. Even if the population of trollus mvpus shifts geographically – the past two years have been populated by Detroiters who have an understandable affinity for Cabrera – people's fandom does not preclude them from at very least trying to understand why others might disagree.

Being informed is a good thing, and it does not take a math degree to understand Trout's superiority. Here's a dirty little secret: I think Wins Above Replacement, the catch-all, go-to stat adopted by the sabermetric glitterati as the best determinant of value, is full of crap. The idea is great: Boil down everything a player does on the baseball field to one number. The execution is flawed. On the hitting side, both FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference.com, the two most popular purveyors of WAR, put great stock in defensive metrics. Truth is, defensive metrics are statistical Snickers bars: as wholly satisfying as they may seem, they're calorically empty, and giving them equal weight to the much more developed hitting statistics bastardizes the final product.

So, no, my case for Trout has nothing to do with WAR. It has to do with tangible facts that modern metrics have helped teach us. Like, fielding does matter, and even if we cannot measure it with exact precision, some combination of scouting reports and metrics gives us an accurate hierarchy. And accordingly, position matters as well; a center fielder provides greater value than a third baseman, who is more important than a first baseman, and so on. Keeping track of every baserunning intricacy lets us know it wasn't just Trout's steals that dwarfed Cabrera's impact on the basepaths. Trout took an extra base on teammates' hits twice as often as Cabrera did, and those bases add up to runs.


Miguel Cabrera, the game's best hitter, won his second straight MVP award Thursday. (AP Photo) Thinking this way requires a lot. First, a willingness to drop long-held beliefs, which anybody will admit takes time. Next, the motivation to educate oneself, something that in many wanes regardless of the subject. And finally, a desire to look at baseball through an objective lens, the toughest sell of all, because sports is an inherently subjective pastime.

In the aftermath of the voting, I sent out four Trout-related tweets. One reply came from Tom Haudricourt, a 28-year BBWAA member, who suggested Trout garnered little support because the Los Angeles Angels stunk. Why teammates' performances have such great impact on an individual award I'll never understand. And please don't come with the if-he-wasn't-there-Detroit-wouldn't-have-made-the-playoffs hypothetical or the his-games-mattered-more canard. The former is impossible to discern – similarly, imagine how bad the Angels would've been sans Trout – and the latter is flimsy logic. A game matters as much as a player believes it does, and considering Trout outperformed Cabrera significantly in the second half, it's fair to say Trout believed those games mattered quite a bit.

His reply: "We can make it easier by renaming it ‘Best Stats Award.' Sort of like the Hank Aaron Award. I prefer the MVP debates."

And they say 140 characters isn't enough to make a point. It's good enough for two, actually. Somehow, the sabermetric revolution turned stats into ... something worthy of derision? MVP voting should be easier thanks to what we now understand. We can demystify long-held beliefs, learn things that broaden our perspective. Without statistics, our votes would be nothing more than personal biases come to life. Stats fortify opinions and strengthen perspectives. They do not fill out ballots. They inform those whose privilege it is to fill them out and whose responsibility it is to fill them out ably.

Moreover, this whole idea of the MVP debate as something good is untoward. It is not our job to spur debate, even if it personifies the no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity truism and foists the BBWAA into the public consciousness for one day a year. Even if the BBWAA changes the MVP voting rules to reflect the best player winning, it will not silence those who believe their guy should win. It simply places the burden on the uninformed to come up with a better reason than, "Cuz he's better."

The MVP is the baseball writers' award, and as such, the writers must ask themselves an important pair of questions: What do we embrace? What do we hold true? The point of this exercise is not to gerrymander the rules but post one final legitimate question in the face of a sport that has evolved and a voting bloc that seems disinclined to go with it: Do the majority believe that nebulous guidance crafted decades ago provides the best conduit through which the BBWAA can select the Most Valuable Player? If so, maybe then I will lay back for the time being, knowing that eventually the five-point voting criteria will change, because all bad things do.

For now, we'll have to live with one of the best right-handed hitters ever winning back-to-back MVPs, which provides some solace. Still, the double-barreled blast of Trout being seen not as Mickey Mantle 2.0 but some amalgamation of numbers and his team's mediocrity turns these MVP votes into another pair in which the wrong player won, no matter how well Cabrera wears the MVP crown.

In the end, not as well as Mike Trout, the man who should've won, the best player in baseball. The real MVP, trolls.
 

Topnotchsy

Featured Contributor, The best players in history?
Aug 7, 2008
9,446
170
I believe that what happened (for many of the voters) was that people looked at last year's race when Cabrera beat Trout, looked at Cabrera's stats and noted that his stats this season were better than his stats last season, and therefore deduced that he must be the MVP once again.

There are many issues with this line of thinking, but one problem is that until a couple of days before the season ended last year, most people assumed that Trout would win the MVP. He had put up incredible numbers at the plate, was a highlight reel in the outfield and was widely accepted as being the best player in the AL. It was only when Cabrera won the Triple Crown that most people shifted their opinion, opting to recognize the first player to win the Triple Crown in decades over the best player in baseball in 2012.

While I wasn't a fan of that logic then, I understand how statistics and awards (regardless of how dependent they are on people around them [like RBI's] or whether they are an amalgamation or a random list of statistics [as the Triple Crown award is... why not include runs or hits, why include RBI etc.]) play a huge role and therefore was ok with Cabrera winning last season. This year though, I just don't get it, especially since the voters did the exact opposite in the NL, when they eschewed voting for the player with the traditional counting stats (Paul Goldschmidt) and voted (almost unanimously) for the player with better advanced metrics.
 

Hendersonfan

New member
May 2, 2011
4,118
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Buckeye Country
If you really study the history of the MVP award it has always had snubs and some massive ones. Some of the greatest seasons in history were never rewarded with the MVP.

When Joe Gordon won it. He still had a solid season, but 2 fellow Hall of Famers had amazing seasons as well.

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jbhofmann

Active member
Mar 12, 2009
6,914
2
Indiana
Babe Ruth 1931 = 10.32 WAR for the season

149 Runs
199 Hits
46 HR
163 RBI
128 BB
.373 AVG
.495 OBP (ON BASE HALF THE TIME!!!!)
.700 SLG
1.195 OPS

Led the league in 6 of those categories......finished 5th in the voting.


Shut this thread down.
 

Topnotchsy

Featured Contributor, The best players in history?
Aug 7, 2008
9,446
170
Babe Ruth 1931 = 10.32 WAR for the season

149 Runs
199 Hits
46 HR
163 RBI
128 BB
.373 AVG
.495 OBP (ON BASE HALF THE TIME!!!!)
.700 SLG
1.195 OPS

Led the league in 6 of those categories......finished 5th in the voting.


Shut this thread down.

From what I hear it's most of the same people doing the voting :)
 

cards01fan

New member
Sep 4, 2008
345
0
Babe Ruth 1931 = 10.32 WAR for the season

149 Runs
199 Hits
46 HR
163 RBI
128 BB
.373 AVG
.495 OBP (ON BASE HALF THE TIME!!!!)
.700 SLG
1.195 OPS

Led the league in 6 of those categories......finished 5th in the voting.


Shut this thread down.

Why shut this thread down?
 

phillyfan0417

Well-known member
Administrator
Aug 7, 2008
43,551
43
Greenfield, Wisconsin, United States
So defense and stolen bases should tip the scales in the way of a player who on top of playing for an inferior team, wasnt even in the conversation from an offensive standpoint? I dont even understand an article which doesnt really dive into stats and makes no factual points other than to say this was an old school choice?


Seriously, even if you were to say the players are head to head, wins and losses tip the scale one way or the other.


http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/cabremi01.shtml

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/troutmi01.shtml
 

scotty216brs

Active member
Apr 15, 2012
3,524
16
MA
As for the original topic, might not always be fair that a player from a playoff team usually wins it over a player from a non-playoff team, but that's how it is the majority of the time. So what more does Trout have to do? Hope the Tigers don't make the playoffs...
 

Hendersonfan

New member
May 2, 2011
4,118
0
Buckeye Country
If the rules that are in place now, were then, Ruth would have the most MVP awards. Originally you could only win it once.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Freedom Card Board mobile app
 

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