MLB: Top Five AL MVP Candidates For September

With one month left in the MLB regular season, these are the top five contenders for the AL MVP award.

The MVP award is often the most debated award handed out at the end of the MLB season. Everyone seems to have his or her own personal definition of “valuable.” For some people, the most valuable player in the league is simply the best player. Who would be your top pick if you could choose any player in the league? For others, the most valuable player must make an impact on the pennant race, so this player must come from a competitive team. Sorry about that, good player on a losing team, you aren’t as valuable because your teammates are worse.

The official MVP ballot that is presented to BBWAA voters says, “There is no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who was the Most Valuable Player in each league to his team. The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.”

For me, this is simple. The Most Valuable Player is the best player. The instructions explicitly state that “the MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier”, so any writer who is compelled to put a player from a playoff team higher on the ballot than a player from a non-playoff team is doing so despite the instructions saying this does not need to be a criteria.

It’s often been said that “MVP candidate’s team could have finished last without him, so how valuable could he have been?” A counter to this would be a very good player on a great team, like Kris Bryant on the Cubs. The Cubs are 15 games ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals in the NL Central. Take Bryant off the Cubs and they still win their division easily, so how much difference did Bryant make? I don’t buy into this logic. I believe the best player is the most valuable player.

With this in mind, I present my top five players in contention for the AL MVP award. I’m using a combination of Fangraphs Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and Baseball-Reference WAR to get a general idea of the top players, then I consider Win Probability Added (WPA) to distinguish among the best players in the league if they are close in overall value. Win Probability Added “captures the change in win expectancy from one plate appearance to the next and credits or debits the player based on how much their action increased the team’s odds of winning.” (definition from Fangraphs glossary)

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