MLB 2025 Season

The Fixer wrote:

another MVP article.


I'VE HAD JUST about enough of this sabermetric correctness pervading the debate about who should win the AL MVP. Miguel Cabrera won MLB's first Triple Crown in 45 years, but support for his candidacy has been called "Luddite," "a backlash against progress," "irresponsible" and a "mistake." New-breed statheads seem to think it's simply irrational that anyone other than Mike Trout could be most valuable.



Well, I hate to break it to my fellow professional geeks, but they are utterly wrong in how they're thinking about this argument. As a result, they've rushed to judgment in anointing Trout.



Many Trout backers are using a stat called Wins Above Replacement to capture the broad swath of the superstar rookie's talents. WAR is an ubermetric that measures how many wins a player contributed to his team compared with a replacement-level player, based on his value at the plate, on the bases and in the field. This season, Trout amassed, according to Baseball-Reference.com, a whopping 10.7 WAR -- one of the 50 highest marks in modern baseball history. Cabrera finished with 6.9 WAR.



The traditionalists who love RBIs, however, have a point when they complain that WAR doesn't measure situational performance. Indeed, in trying to evaluate players in neutral contexts, many modern stats strip away what athletes have actually accomplished. WAR and its component statistics don't care if runners are in scoring position when a player hits a double, or if it's the ninth inning of a scoreless game when he steals a base. They are built not to care, because situational results almost always even out over time and don't reflect a player's overall skill.



But just because something isn't sustainable doesn't mean it has no value. Look, if we're trying to evaluate how good a player Miguel Cabrera is -- or how he compares to other third basemen, how likely he is to keep hitting more than 40 home runs a year, how much the Tigers should pay him -- we don't want the "when" of his hitting to matter. We want to use stats with predictive power (like OPS or WAR) to measure his talent. But if we are looking retrospectively at the value of what Cabrera has done, then context matters a lot; breaking a scoreless tie is much more important than piling on in a blowout. This year, A's rookie Yoenis Cespedes hit .345 and drove in 54 runs in 135 plate appearances with men in scoring position. Maybe he was lucky, but those runs were real, and so were the games they helped win. And nobody's going to take down Oakland's division crown if Cespedes hits .243 with runners in scoring position next year. The V in MVP is about what a player has done to help his team win ballgames during the current season.



That's why in looking for the 2012 MVP, the best stat to use isn't WAR but Win Probability Added. Win probability is simply the expected chance that a team will win a game given the situation it faces. And the WPA for any player is the difference between his team's win probability before and after any given play. So, for instance, with two outs and nobody on in the bottom of the eighth inning of a tie game, the home team has a 52.3 percent chance of winning, according to sabermetrician Tom Tango. If the next batter slices a triple, his team's chance of winning jumps to 60 percent. WPA credits the player with the increase in win probability, or 0.077 of a game, for that plate appearance. If we add up WPAs for every hitter and pitcher in every game across a season, we measure the cumulative impact each player has had on his team. And that, my fellow Americans, is the definition of the MVP.



WPA reveals extraordinary performances that go beyond traditional and advanced metrics. For example, in 2005 Alex Rodriguez led the American League in home runs (48), OPS (1.031) and WAR (9.1). But David Ortiz should have won the MVP. He hit an incredible 20 homers that either tied games or gave his team the lead, so his WPA dwarfed Rodriguez's, 8.75 to 6.18.



And this season's WPA leader in the AL? Well, it's not Cabrera. At 4.85, he doesn't even rank second -- Prince Fielder does, at 4.93. The winner, at 5.28 WPA, is ... Mike Trout. So yeah, the kid should win the MVP. But let's be smarter about the case for why.

DewieCox wrote:

What took probably hours and hours for that guy to write I can do in 10 seconds. Cabrera should get the MVP, no questions asked. Team in WS, Triple Crown, fuckoff Trout.

lukin2006 wrote:

Nice call Major League Baseball...still don't think it's raining in Detroit...probably be in the 5th inning by now...I wish they'd just get back to playing the games and fuck all this technology...

The Fixer wrote:

DewieCox wrote:

What took probably hours and hours for that guy to write I can do in 10 seconds. Cabrera should get the MVP, no questions asked. Team in WS, Triple Crown, fuckoff Trout.

you obviously don't understand that this award is voted on before the playoffs start

other than that it's a solid post