The MVPs in an objective alternate universe

The truly most valuable players probably won’t win the Most Valuable Player Awards during MLB Awards season

Let’s begin with an assumption: Christian Yelich will win the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award when MLB awards are announced.
The reasons why this will happen are a bit complex, but performance and merit are certainly high on the list. Yelich won the National League batting championship, made a strong run at the home run and RBI titles, and was the driving force behind Milwaukee’s late-season push to catch the Chicago Cubs in the NL Central race. He batted .360 in September with 10 home runs and 33 RBIs, doing a preponderance of that damage during the Brewers’ season-ending seven-game winning streak.

That’s a quality MVP resume, and assuming Yelich does win the award, no one can have a powerful argument with the outcome.
Yet Yelich is also likely to benefit from factors that are best described as sensory. Take that final week. To the close observer, it always seemed that Yelich came up at precisely the critical point in the game, and it always seemed that he delivered. For understandable reasons, players who do such magical things tend to accumulate the support of voters who are in search of a rationale for their vote. Yet senses, as Dickens wisely observed, can be easily deceived. That may not make Yelich’s MVP case the baseball equivalent of “a fragment of an underdone potato,” but it is worth a close and objective examination of the actual, season-long data.

There is a simple, straightforward and objective way to remove the sensory aspects from a measure of any player’s value relative to all other MVP candidates, resulting in an utterly objective finding. That method, which has been outlined previously on these pages, involves looking at the percentage and magnitude in each candidate’s “victories” in individual player-pitcher matchups, those micro-showdowns that are the heart and soul of baseball.

This formula has the salubrious side-benefit of allowing a fair comparison of the relative performances of both batters and pitchers, a challenge that somehow often eludes real MVP voters.

The formula for calculating this percentage is not at all complicated: divide total bases by plate appearances (assigning one base for walks and hit batters), and calculate the percentage of batter (or pitcher) “wins” in such matchups. When rating pitchers – who obviously are in the business of preventing the reaching of a base, not achieving same — reverse the polarity of the result by subtracting it from 1.000.

Let’s plug Christian Yelich into the formula. He had 649 plate appearances, resulting in 343 total bases via hits plus 68 bases on balls and 14 hit by pitches. That totals to 425 “batter-pitcher wins” – the best score by any National League hitter in 2018 – and a .655 percentage when counted against his plate appearances.

Second among National League hitters was Nolan Arenado, with a score of .625.

The problem with using that data to ratify the case for Yelich as NL MVP is that pitchers have not yet been factored in. Some of them also had exceptional seasons, often for teams less gloriously in the spotlight. And when pitchers are factored in, the list of 10 most-deserving National League MVP candidates looks like this:

1. Jacob deGrom, New York Mets .689
2. Christian Yelich, Milwaukee Brewers .655
3. Aaron Nola, Philadelphia Phillies .647
4. Zack Wheeler, New York Mets .635
5. Miles Mikolas, St. Louis Cardinals .633
6. Patrick Corbin, Arizona Diamondbacks .628
7. (tie) Max Scherzer, Washington Nationals
and Nolan Arenado, Colorado Rockies .625
9. Mike Foltyniewicz, Atlanta Braves .615
10. Trevor Story, Colorado Rockies .608

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Assuming the AL MVP Award goes to Boston’s

, the prohibitive favorite of speculators for MLB awards, the result will also fit the description of “understandable and entirely reasonable, but….” As with the presumed selection of Yelich in the National League, Betts is an excellent pick, but not the most excellent pick. Nor, for that matter, is his teammate and presumed runner-up,

. As with deGrom, the most deserving candidate is a player whose performance is only exceeded by expectation, causing his merits to be taken for granted.

Here are the 10 most deserving American League MVP candidates based on the formula outlined above:

1. Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels .705
2. Mookie Betts, Boston Red Sox .688
3. J.D. Martinez, Boston Red Sox .659
4. Blake Snell, Tampa Bay Rays .647
5. Trevor Bauer, Cleveland Indians .636
6. Jose Ramirez, Cleveland Indians .627
7. Gerrit Cole, Houston Astros .618
8. Corey Kluber, Cleveland Indians .616
9. Justin Verlander, Houston Astros .613
10. Alex Bregman, Houston Astros .603

Using this method definitely gives us a different answer than most MLB awards predictions. Do you agree with the results? Comment below!