MLB players to win Triple Crown without being named MVP
By Bill Felber
Toronto Blue Jays’ first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is now on a full-out chase to become only the second Triple Crown winner in more than a half century. With his 44th home run Sunday, tying Shohei Ohtani for leadership in that department, he needs only to catch White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu in RBIs.
Abreu has 107; Guerrero is fourth in that category with 102.
Since Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown for Boston in 1967, only one player has led in all three categories. Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown in 2012, batting .330 with 44 home runs and 139 RBIs.
The way he’s hitting, Guerrero has a legitimate chance to catch Abreu and win the Triple Crown. But given the performance, both pitching and batting, of Ohtani, it is less certain that even a Triple Crown would clinch MVP votes for Guerrero.
Yet as odd as it sounds, it’s not especially unusual for Triple Crown winners to get short-shrift by MVP voters. In fact, since the creation of the first MVP Award, there have been a dozen Triple Crown winners, five of whom failed to win the MVP.
For the most part, those slights appear to have been driven by the fact that the Triple Crown winners played for teams that under-performed expectations. In all five cases, the Triple Crown winner lost out to a player from a league champion.
If nothing else, that would make the 2021 vote unique since Ohtani is not going to be pitching or hitting for a pennant winner.
Since creation of the MVP Award, the seven players who won both a Triple Crown and an MVP were Rogers Hornsby in 1925, Jimmie Foxx in 1933, Joe Medwick in 1937, Mickey Mantle in 1956, Frank Robinson in 1966, Yastrzemski in 1967 and Cabrera in 2012.
But their stories aren’t the interesting ones. More intriguing are the Triple Crown winners who got bypassed by MVP voters. Here are their stories.