Should A Pitcher be the National League MVP?
Every year, Major League Baseball crowns a Most Valuable Player for both the American and National Leagues. Each time, the same arguments about why or why not certain players should be considered for the honor seem to get brought up again.
What makes discussions about the MVP race in the AL and NL so problematic is that people’s individual standards for assessment of value may vary. One of the best approximations for this, as far as sabermetric analysis is concerned, is wins above replacement (WAR), a statistic that can consider any number of factors for batters and pitchers, including offensive and defensive performance, league averages for wins and runs, the team’s overall performance while that player is on the field, and even the park factors of the stadium in which they play. All of these individual values get boiled down to a single number that can be used for comparison.
Per ESPN via Baseball-Reference, the WAR leader in the American League as of July 28—surprise, surprise!—is the historically talented Mike Trout (7.8 WAR). Looking at his performance thus far, it’s hard to argue with his credentials.
Through 106 games played, Trout is slashing .310/.460/.623 with 29 HR (good for third in the American League) and 59 RBI on the year, not to mention 20 steals, enough for 5th in the AL. No slouches, either, are Jose Ramirez (6.8 WAR) and Mookie Betts (6.5 WAR) who, like Trout, are found up and down the top-10 ranks in the AL in offensive categories. They are as complete players as one is likely to find in today’s game, and should easily factor in the discussion among voters.
In the National League, meanwhile, the leaders in WAR are not everyday players, but pitchers.
As of the same date, Jacob deGrom is tops in the NL with a 6.2 WAR, with Aaron Nola (6.1 WAR) second and Max Scherzer third (5.6 WAR). This presents a bit of a conundrum. Starting pitchers are not everyday players, and in most rotations, pitch every fifth game. In the eyes of some baseball fundamentalists, so to speak, it goes against their better judgment to give a Most Valuable Player award to someone who only starts in roughly 30 or so games. A similar conundrum surfaced last year when J.D. Martinez, who came over the NL in a mid-season trade, played well enough to garner himself some MVP consideration despite playing far fewer NL games than his competitors.
This is not to say, of course, that there isn’t precedent for a pitcher winning his league’s MVP award. In recent memory, Justin Verlander (2011) and Clayton Kershaw (2014) have earned the top honor in the AL and NL, respectively, but prior to Verlander, the last pitcher to garner this award was Dennis Eckersley in 1992. As some baseball writers would have it, the Cy Young award is the pitcher’s milieu, and if they are to be recognized, the Cy Young is the way to go about it. These are the likely the same sort that believe batters who primarily identify as designated hitters should be ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame because they don’t play defense. Edgar Martinez be damned.
Indeed, nominating a pitcher to be first in the MVP voting is a bit of a tough sell. Complicating matters is the bias among voters toward selecting a player who plays for a playoff contender. In the American League, Jose Ramirez isn’t problematic in this regard as a member of the AL Central-leading Cleveland Indians, nor is Mookie Betts undeserving as a member of the AL East-leading Boston Red Sox. Mike Trout, on the other hand, plays for the Los Angeles Angels, who are languishing around the .500 mark and have seen their playoff hopes taken an apparent hit with the ascendancy of the Oakland A’s.
As with pitchers being named MVP, there is precedence for players on non-contenders winning the award. Speaking of Trout, he was American League MVP in 2016 despite the Angels finishing 4th in the AL West and 14 games below .500 (and he’s the best bet to capture the honor this season). Just last year, Giancarlo Stanton also garnered an MVP award in the National League despite playing for the sub-.500 Miami Marlins. Still, this is an occurrence that tends to happen less often than WAR alone might dictate, a more-recent method of valuation as it as.
As the race for Most Valuable Player is understood, then, there is a tension between those who would identify a player as such for literally being the most valuable player to his team and those who insist an MVP should be part of a winning squad (or else how valuable could he really be?). Looking at the NL WAR leaders, while Aaron Nola is the ace of a squad that appears to be part of a two-horse race with the Atlanta Braves in the AL East, Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer represent the underachieving New York Mets and Washington Nationals, respectively. In deGrom’s case, there is the objectively weird phenomenon of a man with a WAR above 6.0 and only five wins on the season. By the latter standard, these hurlers should have no business being part of the MVP conversation.
Looking at these pitchers’ teams, though, their value seems readily apparent. Jacob deGrom is clearly his team leader when it comes to wins above replacement, and if he received even a decent amount of run support from his team, he could easily have twice as many wins to his record sporting a sub-2.00 ERA and sub-1.00 WHIP. The pitcher on the roster with the next-best WAR per Baseball-Reference is Noah Syndergaard (2.1 WAR), and he spent some two months on the disabled list thanks to a strained hand ligament and is back on the DL at this writing thanks to contracting hand, foot, and mouth disease. In other words, there’s no question deGrom is the most valuable pitcher on the Mets, and is by all reasonable accounts the most valuable player.
Aaron Nola and Max Scherzer have likewise been the clear aces of their pitching staffs. Nola’s top competition in terms of wins above replacement are Zach Eflin (2.0 WAR), who didn’t appear in a major-league game for the Phillies until May 1, and Vince Velasquez (2.0 WAR), who has spent the better part of the 2018 season with an ERA upwards of 4.00. After Scherzer, the best option for the Nationals in the starting rotation has been Gio Gonzalez (2.0 WAR), someone Scherzer bests by better than a half a walk/hit per inning and nearly a run-and-a-half better per nine innings. Without the contributions of Nola and Scherzer, Philadelphia might be struggling to stay relevant in the NL Wild Card standings, and Washington might be several games under .500 and even yet more disappointing.
In a season in which no everyday player in the National League jumps out as a consensus pick for Most Valuable Player—cases can be made for a crowded field including Nolan Arenado, Javier Baez, Lorenzo Cain, Matt Carpenter, Freddie Freeman, and Eugenio Suarez—it should be deemed as appropriate if not more so to consider Jacob deGrom, Aaron Nola, or Max Scherzer for the award at this point. They’ve done more than their fair share for their respective clubs, and shouldn’t be penalized in the voting for working on a starting pitcher’s schedule.
-Joseph Mangano
