27 thoughts on “MVP Elections – 2017 NL”

1. Nate Jakobs November 16, 2017 at 3:23 pm

   Votto
   Stanton
   Rendon
   Blackmon
   Bryant
   Scherzer
   Goldschmidt
   Arenado
   Turner
   Jansen

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2. ThickieDon November 16, 2017 at 3:31 pm

   1. Giancarlo Stanton – most homers since Bonds in 2001
   2. Joey Votto – .320/.454/.578 is tough to argue against even with subpar baserunning and defense
   3. Kris Bryant
   4. Charlie Blackmon
   5. Anthony Rendon
   6. Tommy Pham
   7. Justin Turner
   8. Nolan Arenado
   9. Paul Goldschmidt
   10. Bryce Harper – monster offense in limited games, just nabs last slot

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3. PAul November 16, 2017 at 3:57 pm

   Votto
   Stanton
   Arenado
   Blackmon
   Goldschmidt
   Rendon
   Bryant
   Turner, someone from LA needed
   Scherzer
   Harper

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4. no statistician but November 16, 2017 at 4:41 pm

   To repeat my original vote on the other thread:

   1) Arenado
   2) Blackmon
   3) Goldschmidt
   4) Rizzo
   5) Bellinger
   6) Votto
   7) Turner
   8) Bryant
   9) Stanton
   10) Rendon

   I originally had a four-way tie for tenth place— Rendon, Harper, Zimmerman, Murphy—but I’m guessing Dr. Doom won’t allow that kind of frivolity. Doc, you’re a hard taskmaster.

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5. Paul E November 16, 2017 at 5:50 pm

   Here’s my prior ballot from the same thread that nsb referenced:

   1) Blackmon
   2) Stanton
   3) Bellinger
   4) Goldschmidt
   5) Votto
   6) Bryant
   7) Arenado
   8) Harper
   9) Seager
   10 Travis Shaw

   FWIW, per B-Ref, Blackmon did create 30 more runs than Arenado. God only knows how many more runs Bryant may have knocked in if Madden batted him 3rd or 4th instead of 2nd and, for that matter, how much prettier his numbers would have appeared to voters

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6. no statistician but November 16, 2017 at 6:13 pm

   The early voting is tilting toward Votto, and in several respects he deserves our admiration, but I’m one who believes that the MVP should go to a player on a team that shows at least some signs of contending for the playoffs. The Reds lasted about a month in serious contention in a division that scrambled for wins early, and then sank out of sight, being five games back on June 14, nine and a half back at the All-Star break, and 24 back by the end. It’s not a question of how much worse they might have been without him, but the fact that their pitching was abysmal and they weren’t going anyplace regardless. His season is admirable. With it the Reds finished 2 games below their Pythagorean probability.

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7. Voomo Zanzibar November 16, 2017 at 6:45 pm

   For your overlooked consideration, Marcell Ozuna.

   https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/o/ozunama01.shtml

   Slash with RISP:
   .356 / .444 / .619 / 1.063

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8. Dr. Doom November 16, 2017 at 8:14 pm

   Hey everyone!

   I’ve been driving most of the day today so didn’t get to check in earlier. Anyway, let’s keep the polls open until Monday night at 11:59 PM your local time – west coasters, enjoy the extra couple hours you get. You’re disadvantaged so often, this is my way of making it up to you. If we have any Hawaiian readers, you have like an extra half day over the east coasters, so use it wisely. 🙂

   Happy voting, everyone!

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9. Bryan O\'Connor November 16, 2017 at 10:30 pm

   My ballot is based on overall value, adjusted for performance in high-leverage situations. It’s basically fWAR +/- 1/2 of Fangraphs’ Clutch score, with a few minor tweaks:

   1. Rendon
   2. Blackmon
   3. Votto
   4. Arenado
   5. Stanton
   6. Pham
   7. Seager
   8. Bryant
   9. Rizzo
   10. Goldschmidt

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10. Jeff Harris November 17, 2017 at 9:43 am

    Votto
    Stanton
    Arenado
    Rendon
    Blackmon
    Ozuna
    Goldschmidt
    Bryant
    Turner
    Pham

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11. e pluribus munu November 17, 2017 at 10:52 pm

    1. Votto
    2. Arenado
    3. Stanton
    4. Goldschmidt
    5. Scherzer
    6. Rendon
    7. Strasburg
    8. Blackmon
    9. Pham
    10. Jansen

    I’ve always looked at the MVP award as primarily the “season’s best player” award. Players are not in control of the quality of the team on which they play, so I don’t consider whether a player contributed to a post-season run to be relevant. That doesn’t mean that outstanding clutch performance in the heat of a tight race doesn’t count (thinking of Yaz in ’67), but I don’t think we have that sort of situation here, since, as Doom wrote, there really weren’t any particularly tight races or clutch performances in the stretch. I think Votto was, as usual, terrific, and I can’t count his team’s lousy record as relevant. I picked Arenado over Stanton because of his defensive role — no knock on Stanton.

    I think pitchers are fully eligible to be judged the season’s best player, but, good as the best of them this year were, I don’t think any were overpoweringly strong in the manner of, say, McClain in ’68, so their limited day-to-day roles were not overcome by true dominance on their pitching days, and none really contends for the top spot. I’m not much of an advocate for relief pitchers, but Jansen’s game log this year seems near-perfect (I’ve been tracking his evaluation on the FiveThirtyEight site all year, and they make a good case for how exceptional he has been), and I think he deserves to be on this list despite the low IP totals of a contemporary closer.

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12. no statistician but November 20, 2017 at 12:18 am

    Here’s a factoid: This year is only the second since 1988 that the leader in WAR among those receiving votes captured all six awards—MVP, CY, ROY. I haven’s had time to go back further, but I’m wondering if this year and 1997 are just anomalies in which the WAR leader either had no serious or only one serious challenger in each league and category. Also, in the past four years 19 out of 24 awards have gone to the WAR leader, something that far exceeds the previous four year record of 15 (in the last thirty years).

    Does this mean that we’ve finally turned the corner into the WAR cul-de-sac?

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    1. Mike L November 20, 2017 at 11:18 am

       There’s obviously convergence between terrific performance in traditional stats and in high WAR values. But you are also seeing a secular change in the awards voting population, as the older writers less willing to embrace advanced stats start to age out. That leaves people in a strange place–15 years ago, it was cool to look at WAR, but now, they don’t want to be thought of as automatons (why bother thinking about things when you can just go 1-10 in WAR?). But they also don’t want to be thought of as idiots (how can you pick the 5WAR guy over the 8WAR guy?) I don’t think you are ever going to see another 1979 Willie Stargell. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there will be some sort of backlash against the tyranny of context-neutral evaluations when used to evaluate modest gradations.

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    2. e pluribus munu November 20, 2017 at 9:05 pm

       nsb, In 1997, the AL WAR leader was Roger Clemens, but the MVP was Griffey Jr. Did you mean to exclude pitchers from the MVP?

       I noticed this after checking all years from 1956 to your starting point of 1988, and finding no years with all awards going to the WAR leader among eligible candidates — however, I counted pitchers for the MVP, since some years they did, of course, win the MVP with highest league WAR, such as Gibson in 1968 and Kershaw in 2014. In ’86, Clemens won the MVP without the highest WAR, but only because Teddy Higuera topped him.

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       1. no statistician but November 20, 2017 at 11:56 pm

          epm:

          Right, more or less. My survey included pitchers only if they won the MVP and with the highest listed WAR. My reasons, even though I’m one of the few who think the CY is enough for pitchers, are that I simply do not think 1) that, regardless of arguments and supposed evidence to the contrary by people who have bought into advanced stats with less skepticism than I hold, I do not accept pitching WAR and batting WAR as interchangeable, and therefore I can’t conscience a mixing of the two as equivalences; 2) that I don’t regard pitching WAR to be nearly as accurate as batting WAR in terms of expressing real value. We haven’t reopened this discussion for a couple of years, and I’m not interested in doing so now, but I still regard batting WAR as being about 95% accurate on average and pitching WAR to be about 80% accurate, and in saying this I don’t mean that pitching WAR is 80% accurate for every pitcher, but that, among other problems, it can miss the excellences of some pitchers who don’t fit the mold—a poor metaphor, I realize—however accurately it pinpoints those of others. Its approach is far less flexible than batting WAR, more ‘one size fits all’ in its perspective, or rather ‘here’s the ideal size all pitchers should fit into.’

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          1. e pluribus munu November 21, 2017 at 12:19 am

             I’d love to pursue this sometime, nsb, and not because I disagree with you, but because I’d like to be forced to get clearer in my own mind how I stand on the two aspects you list . . . it may be that earlier HHS debates on this came during one of the periods when I was AWOL.

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          2. Mike L November 21, 2017 at 8:45 am

             EPM, it’s interesting that you said this, because it’s striking how the relative trade valuations of players vs.pitchers has changed over time. If you had told a GM in 1967 that you wanted to trade four prospects for one reliever who might throw 60-80 IP he’d fire you on the spot. When the Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas deal was made there was shock not just because people knew Robinson was better, but that the Reds would trade a position player of Robinson’s calibre for just a pitcher–someone you would see every fifth day. BTW, Pappas wasn’t a bad pitcher–he has 22 BWAR before the trade, and 24.8 BWAR after that.

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             1. e pluribus munu November 21, 2017 at 1:20 pm

                Good point, Mike: it’s useful to supplement an assessment of what advanced stats tell us about comparative pitcher/position player value with broad views of contemporary understanding. It seems pretty clear that there’s a wide gap now between WAR and management assessments of top closer values, and in that case I think at least some of the gap concerns the way the WAR framework was set up.

                On Robinson vs. Pappas, I don’t really recall the discussion of position advantage being in the foreground in ’65 — so much of the emphasis was on Bill DeWitt’s comment about Robinson being an “old 30.” But I think it’s often forgotten that apart from Pappas, who had become an established starter at a very young age and seemed to have many more years ahead of him, the Reds also got Jack Baldschun, who was still in his 20s, with some prospect remaining of recapturing the form that had made him such a spectacular reliever a few years earlier (didn’t work out).

                I was never a Pappas fan. It seemed to me he established early on a benchmark as an ordinary #2/#3 man in a rotation, without prospects for much more. In terms of his post-trade WAR, the Reds got little of it — Pappas didn’t have his best years till the tail end of his career, when he pitched for the Cubs under Durocher: well over half his post-trade WAR came in 1970-72 (after a mid-season trade in ’70), by far his best three-year stretch, and then he was done. Durocher forced Pappas to pitch when he didn’t want to — starting him often, making him stay in games, and the result was that Pappas achieved his career high of 17 (!) wins in 1971 (I recall him as the first pitcher to win 200 games without a 20-win season; he never even reached 18). In his autobiography, Durocher excoriates Pappas for his laziness and prima donna attitude. They were in constant conflict, and when Durocher left in mid-season the following year, Pappas had returned to his old, mediocre form, on target for a record of 11-11. But after Leo left, Pappas had the greatest streak of his life, finishing the season with 11 wins in his last 11 starts, including 5 CGs, 2 ShOs, and a 1.86 ERA, duplicating his 17-win total from ’71 and getting to 200 wins. (If I’d worked for Leo, I can imagine life blooming anew when he got canned.) After that, Pappas was done. He had nothing left in the tank, and after a lousy ’73 season he was finished at 34 (while the older Robinson was still putting up good numbers). So Pappas’s post-trade WAR figure for me largely represents two phenomena that could never have been predicted in 1965: Pappas being subjected to Durocher’s tyranny in late 1970 and 1971, and Pappas enjoying his one brief period of manic productivity when released from the tyrant’s clutches.
             2. Paul E November 21, 2017 at 2:50 pm

                Kind of funny how Durocher thought Pappas was dogging it. For his career Pappas pitched 43 shutouts. In the seasons since (1974-2017), only Clemens and Ryan have pitched more shutouts at 46 each.
                But, yeah, I do remember the mantra that you weren’t supposed to trade an everyday player for a pitcher. But, just like the scenario above, things change. I guess now you trade the league’s MVP because you can’t compete with him (as opposed to not being competitive without him).
                I’m off the beaten track here but, count me among those who want to see Stanton accept a trade to Colorado and hit 600 foot home runs – about 70 of them (at home, of course -another 25 or 30 on the road).
             3. e pluribus munu November 21, 2017 at 8:35 pm

                It may be a little misleading to compare Pappas’s shutout totals only to post-’74 games. Lots of pitchers who came up after Pappas pitched more shutouts than he (I count 15 of them). The post-’60s decline of complete games meant that Pappas’s good-but-not-great total would become an outstanding one for subsequent generations.

                One of my stupidest mistakes in life (actually, I made several thousand more stupid) was to give away Durocher’s autobiography to a baseball-crazed kid forty years ago. I’ve never gotten hold of a replacement. But Google books has let me locate some of the passages I was recalling about Pappas. According to Durocher, the thing about Pappas was that he always wanted to “spit out the bit”: he’d pitch into the late innings, get a lead, and want to be taken out so he wouldn’t risk losing and would probably get the win. He’d tell Durocher he was tired and needed relief. After awhile, Durocher caught on and refused to talk to Pappas during games, having told him the only time he’d take him out was when batters began hitting him. The result is that Pappas, who had compiled a fair number of shutouts during the Era of Pitcher in the ’60s, had a late surge in shutouts under Leo in a different era, leading the league for the only time in his career in 1971. Had his career followed a normal trajectory, his total would surely have been in the mid-30s.

                Pappas had talent: he certainly did pitch a lot of shutouts. But his CG ratio was low for the era among quality pitchers. Perhaps if he’d stayed in games longer, he’d probably have had a truly impressive shutout total, and probably more than a max of 17 wins in a season — and according to Leo, the fact that he didn’t was more a product of Pappas’s own preferences than his mangers’.

                Of course, the flaw in all this reasoning is that to accept it you have to believe Durocher. His autobiography was ghosted by a terrific writer, Ed Linn (who also wrote Veeck — As In Wreck), and Linn somehow made a weasel like Durocher a credible — even likable (!) — witness. If Leo had written his own book, I’d probably see things Pappas’s way.

                (By the way, the Times obit for Linn recorded a terrific exchange with Veeck after the two had argued over whether to include some material in the final version of Veeck — As In Wreck. Linn realized he was out of line and apologized, saying, “You have to understand, Bill, that by this time I think I made you up.” According to Linn, Veeck replied, “Don’t worry about it, You have to understand that by this time I think I wrote the book.”)
             4. Paul E November 22, 2017 at 12:23 pm

                e p m,
                Good points, all. I remember seeing an interview with either Rojas or Allen, probably in their 50’s or 60’s, talking about how Tony Gonzalez and how well he hit LH pitching. But, no so well, after further inspection…….Here’s some more Miltie numbers:
                1920-2017 Shutouts, age 19-34
                52 Seaver
                51 Blyleven
                51 Palmer
                50 Sutton
                50 Marichal
                49 Drysdale
                47 Ryan
                45 Gibson
                43 Pappas…. yes, that would be 8 HoF’ers above Miltie

                1958 – 1973 Shutouts
                55 Gibson
                52 Marichal
                45 Drysdale
                43 Pappas

                If what Durocher said was true, Pappas certainly preferred to finish his best work as he placed only 14th in CG for the period 1958-1973
             5. Mike L November 21, 2017 at 3:27 pm

                One very minor note. Pappas was eventually traded to Atlanta in a six player deal. Coming back to the Reds was the immortal Woody Woodward, who had one HR in 2423 career PA. That came off of Ron Reed on July 10, 1970. Reed won the game with a Durocher-esque pitching line of 7.1 IP, 12 H, 3BB, and 7ER. Not to worry about a power problem with the Reds that year–they hit 191, and two Reds pitchers, Tony Cloninger and Jim Merritt, had more HRs that season than Woodward had in his career. Four years earlier, Cloninger hit two Grand Slams in the same game, the first one with Woodward on base. Just a little pre-Turkey trivia.
13. Dr. Doom November 20, 2017 at 1:03 am

    Here’s my vote:

    1. Giancarlo Stanton
    2. Joey Votto
    3. Nolan Arenado
    4. Charlie Blackmon
    5. Paul Goldschmidt
    6. Anthony Rendon
    7. Max Scherzer
    8. Marcell Ozuna
    9. Kris Bryant
    10. Tommy Pham

    I regret that I had no room for any Dodgers. They were all great, but no one played a full season. Otherwise, I feel pretty good about my ballot.

    Also, this is my customary “one day left” post, so don’t forget to vote if you haven’t done so already!

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14. Richard Chester November 20, 2017 at 12:51 pm

    Here’s my vote:
    1. Stanton
    2. Votto
    3. Goldschmidt
    4. Ozuna
    5. Bellinger
    6. Arenado
    7. Blackmon
    8. Rendon
    9. Zimmerman
    10. Scherzer

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15. Dr. Doom November 21, 2017 at 9:50 am

    With ten votes in, here are the final results. I’m listing the player’s point total, with first-place votes in parentheses. Tiebreakers work as follows: first tiebreaker is number of ballots, second tiebreaker is highest position on a ballot, and final tiebreaker is to revert the players to the position they were in before the last vote to have created the tie (this is to reward those who choose not to wait until the end to vote). Without further ado, here are the votes for your 2017 NL MVP:

    1. Joey Votto, 102 (4)
    2. Giancarlo Stanton, 94 (3)
    3. Charlie Blackmon, 73 (1)
    4. Nolan Arenado, 69 (1)
    5. Anthony Rendon, 54 (1)
    6. Paul Goldschmidt, 53
    7. Kris Bryant, 34
    8. Cody Bellinger, 20
    9. Max Scherzer, 18
    10. Tommy Pham, 15
    11. Justin Turner, 15
    12. Marcell Ozuna, 15
    13. Anthony Rizzo, 9
    14. Corey Seager, 6
    15. Bryce Harper, 5
    16. Stephen Strasburg, 4
    17. Kenley Jansen, 2
    18. Ryan Zimmerman, 2
    19. Travis Shaw, 1

    Five of the top six players were named on all ten ballots (Rendon was not named on one).

    The only players named whose teams did NOT make the playoffs were Votto, Stanton, Pham, Ozuna, and Shaw. Pham and Shaw’s teams did finish above .500, which means that 16 of the 19 players were on teams that were in contention. Even the Marlins were in contention into August. Only the winner played on a team whose seasons was more or less over at the All-Star break. Funny how that can happen sometimes.

    Dodgers seemed to have stolen votes from one another, as did non-Rendon Nationals. People were hesitant to name 3+ players from those teams, but every player from those teams was so good that it’s hard to choose. Therefore, you end up with five Nationals and four Dodgers receiving votes.

    Happy to see Travis Shaw get a vote – and it wasn’t even from me being a Brewers homer! A 30 double, 30 homer season, 100+ RBI, perfect 10-10 on stolen bases, and a 121 OPS+ ain’t a bad year. Weirdly, there were a BUNCH of third basemen (Arenado, Bryant, Rendon, Turner, and Shaw) having great seasons. As I said in the post above, it’s the best, deepest position in the NL.

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    1. Paul E November 21, 2017 at 11:41 am

       Doom,
       I threw Travis Shaw a 10th place vote since someone had to be responsible for the Brewers’ vast improvement. The new guy who came back from Japan, Eric Thames,started like gangbusters, faltered, and finished OK while batting at the top of the order but Shaw was relatively strong for most of the year.
       I was also the guy who didn’t vote for Rendon simply because he started relatively slow (.226/.316/.250 0 HR 5 RBI) while the team went 16-8 and then had a 6 for 6, 3 HR-10 RBI game and went from there. I believe if Harper stays healthy, Harper finishes in the top 3….nice turnaround by Zimmerman-almost like a walk-year sense of urgency performance.
       You could make the argument that Votto is the best hitter in the NL based on RC/27 outs. Just curious if he goes out of the strike zone with RISP and, if not, what does that ultimately cost when the .240 hitters behind him fail to get anybody home.THAT evaluation is probably somewhere on Fangraphs or Baseball Prospectus with all kinds of heat-sensitive strike-zone graphics, but…..

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    2. Hartvig November 22, 2017 at 1:33 am

       I contemplated casting a ballot but of the maybe 2 dozen games that I watched this summer- and not all of those in their entirety- I saw the Nats & Dodgers once each & maybe 1 or 2 other NL teams so I didn’t really feel like I was sufficiently informed to make an informed decision. I was hoping maybe some of the voters would give the rationale behind some of their votes or there would be more discussion but other than epm & nsb there were only a few random comments for me to try and sort things out beyond the numbers.

       And in all honesty I don’t think had I voted it would have changed the rankings much if at all. I was leaning towards Votto as my top pick and while I might have put Arenado over Blackmon I doubt it would have been by more than a couple of spots. I would have liked to vote for all of numbers 8 thru 11 but I’m not sure what order I would have put them in or who, if anyone, of the top 7 I would have dropped to make room for all of them.

       I am planning on voting for the AL Cy Young however.

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