Hello, HHS friends!
Here’s our obligatory comment: I’ve been more-or-less totally MIA in 2021. I apologize for that. There’s no excuse, no fancy reasoning. Life is just hard. Hoping you did read my review of Joe Posnanski’s The Baseball 100. And now, with only lockout news to “comfort” us baseball fans, let’s try to keep things positive. It’s awards season! We need something to vote on before the COG elections in January, am I right?
In 2020, I did not run an awards post. The season was too short, things crept up too fast… it just didn’t happen. But I don’t want that to continue in 2021.
Look, I’m going to be the first to acknowledge: I think the vote-for-pitchers, don’t-vote-for-pitchers debate really muddied the waters in some of our last few discussions; I was thinking that, this year, we would switch from a mixed vote to separate awards for the pitchers and position players. But then, along came a player who screwed the whole thing up. So this year, my initial plan was to do separate awards for pitchers and hitters. Unfortunately, there’s one big reason we just can’t do that. So I’m not going to ask us to do so this year. Okay; without further ado, I believe we should start on the senior circuit this year, as well. So who are our candidates? (As always, description after the jump; rules at the bottom of the post.)
Through the end of July, it didn’t look like there’d be much debate. Fernando Tatis of the Padres was batting .292/.374/.657 and making highlight-reel plays daily for a Padres team that was – somehow, at the start of the day on July 30 – just two games back of the Dodgers and five back of the Giants. They were also 7 games ahead of the Reds for the first Wild Card, and 9.5 up on the Phillies for the second. It was, it seemed, impossible that the Padres would miss the postseason, and Tatis was the reason why. Sure, there had been splashy offseason additions to the roster. But Tatis was the story of the National League. Unfortunately, on the day in question, Tatis was injured. The team cratered in his absence and never fully recovered. That said, he did manage to hit .282/.364/.611, good for the second-best SLG in the NL, a mere .004 behind the leader. Again – still while playing fabulous shortstop. Do you know how many post-Integration SS have managed a .600 SLG? Artie Wilson (1948), Ernie Banks (1958), Nomar Garciaparra (1999), Alex Rodriguez (2000-2003), and Tatis. No Ripken, Jeter, or Yount. The list is short indeed (pun intended, and regretted). So was his shortened season (only 130 GP) something that needs to be overlooked? Or was it just too many games missed for the best player in the League?
More relevantly, if Tatis wasn’t the best of the NL, who was? Sans injuries, perhaps an argument could’ve been made for 23-year-old phenom Ronald Acuna, Jr. Instead, let’s focus on the Champs’ overlooked, perennial MVP-candidate. Did you know that, in the last four seasons, Freddie Freeman has only missed seven games total? It’s impressive. That kind of showing up is the thing that lets you lead the league in PAs, as Freeman did this year. Not ABs, though – Freeman walked a very respectable 85 times, leading to his Freeman-like .300/.393/.503 line. While the power is not what it once was (that SLG is his lowest since 2015), Freeman nonetheless scored more runs (120) than anyone in the NL, for the team that won it all!
Of course, while the Braves did eventually win it all, few would argue they were actually baseball’s best team this year. That honor would likely go to the team that won the most games: the San Francisco Giants. They were anchored by Brandon Crawford. Crawford’s .298/.373/.522 line was strong enough for the former two numbers to place in the top-10 in the league, and his 141 OPS+ was 8th.
But even within his own division, there was competition from Dodgers’ midseason acquisition and NL batting champ Trea Turner. I don’t have the wherewithal to look it up right now – but if anyone wants to figure out how many active players have 3+ seasons of a .325 average, I guarantee it’s not a big number. (I can think of Pujols and Cabrera off the top of my head… but I don’t know if there are others, beyond Turner.) The easy knock on Turner is that he’s a singles hitter (he did lead the league in them). But he also led the league in Total Bases. Not only that, his 146 OPS+ was good for 6th in the league. And – little-known fact – Turner was third in the NL with an 86.5% stolen base success rate!
Rounding out the dominant NL West, let’s move to the Central, where we can find a few candidates. The Reds have a few. Zack Wheeler led the league in bWAR, but you’ll get a fuller write-up of him (and the other pitcher candidates, like Walker Buehler, Corbin Burnes, and Max Scherzer) in the Cy Young post. Of course you can – and are encouraged to – vote for any of them here, too! But Wheeler had a couple of teammates worthy of a look.
Former 1st-round pick Nick Castellanos really broke through this year. .309/.362/.576 (good for a 136 OPS+) is good. 100 RBI and 95 runs with 38 doubles and 34 homers means that it’s not just rates, but volume, too. But lest we not forget teammate Joey Votto. Votto has been counted out by many as a useful player. Deeply disappointing seasons in ’19 and ’20 have led some to write off Votto’s career for dead. However, he hit .266/.375/.563 – that SLG is higher than all but one season of Votto’s since 2012 (that one season being 2017, when we named Votto our NL MVP, disagreeing with the BBWAA). Fun fact: since 2010, Votto has had an OBP at least .096 higher than his AVG every single year! While Votto failed to appear in 130 G, his season certainly merits some down-ballot consideration, particularly given the Reds’ improvement as a team, finishing above .500 in a full season for the first time since 2013.
But the perhaps the best candidates are two players out East. A couple of years ago, the Washington Nationals felt they couldn’t pay everybody. So just prior to their winning the World Series, the decided to bet on age. They bet on Juan Soto. Soto cashed in his fourth-straight season with over a .400 OBP. He’s taken over for the aforementioned Votto as the assumed league leader in the category at this point. Soto walked 145 times this season. Not only is that more than he struck out (only 93 times, increasingly rare among even “contact” hitters, much less ones as powerful as Soto), but this was a truly special number. It ranks 23rd all-time in Major League history. If Soto can ever do this a second time, he’d join just Barry Bonds, Ted Williams, and Babe Ruth. I’m pretty sure that being on a list with only those three guys is pretty much everyone’s goal as a baseball player. But it’s not just the OBP and walks that are impressive. Soto finished second in the batting race, as well. His overall line of .313/.465/.534 was good for second in the league in both OPS (.999) and OPS+ (175). It also made him one of only two players to finish in the top-ten in all three triple slash categories.
The other guy? Why, that’s the one the Nationals, in essence, let go in favor of Soto: Bryce Harper. Harper batted .309/.429/.615, the latter number leading the league, with the other two ranking third and second, respectively. The 1.044 OPS and 179 OPS+ were the league-leaders, as were his 42 doubles. Harper lacked the help of teammates on base to get him to 100 RBI (he had only 84), but he was still one of the most formidable hitters in the league, particularly late in the season. On June 30, Harper began an absolute tear. For the rest of the season, he hit .336/.458/.706 and kept the Phillies alive in a race no one gave them a chance in. Entering that morning, they were 37-40. As Harper heated up, so did the team, going 45-40 the rest of the way, and falling just short. They were only 1.5 back of the World Champs as late as September 25. But a classic Phillies late-season collapse doomed the team. Still, the BBWAA just awarded him the MVP. The question remains: will we do the same?
So make your choice, folks! Rules are below. We’ll keep this post open for… let’s say a week. We’ll see if that’s too fast or too slow of a pace. Anyway, I think we’ll do both Cy Youngs as a single post, all the miscellaneous awards as one post, and the AL MVP as its own. That should give us a good four weeks of voting, and keep us in baseball-mode all December… before we get to COG voting in January! So please make your selections below, and I look forward to reading what you have to say, not just about your choices, but in fact whatever discussion you may have to sway others!
Vote by making a comment below and numbering your choices with 1 being the MOST preferred candidate, and 10 being your LEAST preferred candidate of your ten choices. Your ballots will be EXACTLY ten place, just as the BBWAA does. You must vote for 10 players. Scoring will be 14-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, just as the BBWAA does. You are not required to vote in all elections; only vote in the ones you would like to vote in. You may make vote changes, if the discussion so moves you. If you change your vote, please do so in a new comment, not as a reply to your original comment (it’s a lot easier to find new comments than replies to old ones). Please don’t vote strategically; we’re trying to get the best result, not to manipulate the vote totals based on what others have done. Voting will remain open about one week. When players are tied, tiebreakers go as follows: first tiebreaker is number of ballots on which players were named; second tiebreaker is highest placement on a ballot; third tiebreaker is the first player to be named (as this usually only happens when a bunch of players are tied for last). Results will be posted in a comment at the bottom of the post when balloting closes.
Doom,
Thanks for the write-up. Kind of off the beaten path regarding Artie Wilson and ‘post-integration”, I don’t believe the Negro American League was integrated in 1948 (hahahahaha) and, with the Birmingham Black Barons playing 67 games and Artie securing a mere 136 plate appearances, how does he even get credit for a “qualified” season – including black ink for BA and OBP – without the requisite 207 PA’s (3.1 x 67g)?
In support of the official mantra that “Negro Leagues are Major Leagues”, B-R record pages now sport some unfamiliar names as record holders in many rate stats. For example, according to B-R, the all-time record for season BA no longer belongs to Hugh Duffy; instead Tetelo Vargas gets the nod for his .471 BA in 30 games and 121 AB for the New York Cubans in 1943 (it was the last Negro league season for the 37 year-old Vargas, though he played Puerto Rican ball until age 49).
How many players in the “other” major leagues have done as well? Only two: Hank Aaron (.477) in 1959, and Nap Lajoie (.472) in 1901 are the only ones to match Vargas’s BA in 100+ AB (both were over 120 AB) over their first 30 games of the season. Bob Hazle’s .403 BA in 1957, in 41 games and 134 AB, is the highest in a season of comparable length to Vargas’s 1943 campaign.
I understand the math; not the logic. I’ll be the first to tell anyone that it’s very likely that Satchel Paige, as a “talent”, was the equal of Feller and Grove; Gibson the equal or superior to Foxx, Gehrig – maybe even Williams and Ruth. However, if 75% of the best talent was in the American and National Leagues, it’s pretty hard to argue the logic of the revised “records” – particularly in light of limited PA’s and IP’s. The extreme talents like Charleston, Gibson, and Paige were literally playing with and against a lot of AAA talents. Yes, they definitely would have started on ML All Star teams from 1933-1946, but their ‘numbers’ are certainly skewed.
Paul, their numbers are definitely skewed. I don’t think there’s any question of that. I have to assume we’re going to, at some point, learn more than we know now. That might seem farfetched given how much we’ve already learned… yet at the same time, we now know more about the Negro Leagues than people knew even 10 years ago. I’m just viewing these as things that can change.
As for “post-integration”… touche. I can’t really argue much. What I mostly meant was, “I’m not a Stathead subscriber, and I’m doing this by hand, and I’m not going any further back than this.” Should’ve probably just picked ’61 expansion and left it at that; then I wouldn’t have missed Banks in ’58, as nsb points out below (post now corrected). But the main point for me is this: there is absolutely no way you will EVER convince me that the quality of competition in the NNL, even in 1948, was worse than the National League in 1893, or the American League in 1901, or certainly the Federal League in 1914… and yet we’ve been counting those things for years. I don’t hear anyone banging the “but he was playing against AAA competition” drum when they list Cy Young’s win total. (And if you don’t believe me, please consider that he played in an era in which fans occasionally came out of the stands to play in the games; when basically no one west of St. Louis – and a select few south of the Mason-Dixon – and no players of color played in the majors, and we came a hair’s breadth from missing out on all-time greats like Jimmie Foxx, if it weren’t for a scout being in the right place at the right time. If we were lucky to get Foxx, how many Foxxes did we miss because no one happened to drive by a kid cocky enough to lift up a plow?) The only substantial differences are the relative incompleteness of the record and the color of the players. So I applaud the decision, and will continue to use the information we have, no differently that we’ve used the other information since the MacMillan came out over 50 years ago. Any argument you can make against the statistics of Negro League players – with the exception of the incompleteness of the statistics – will hold true for virtually every white player, too. And yet, this is a site in which we gleefully elected Bill Dahlen to our highest award. That was almost certainly the right thing to do, and I have no problem with that selection. I just think the guys on the other side of things have an equally good claim to the same recognition.
Doom,
If 75% of the talent was in MLB up till 1947, I imagine 25% was in the minors and the Negro Leagues. At its peak in the early-mid 1970’s, MLB had about 22% African-American participation. It took about 25 years to get to that level…and then it leveled off. If African-Americans represent 13% of the American population, that 25% is, I believe, a more than fair number. To say that 5 African-Americans would make a 20-man roster in the twenties and thirties is reasonable. Also, how many of those talents were not even tied to a team or a league. I just believe those Negro,League stats are more the equivalent of the American Association and not the NL or AL…also, how thinly spread was the black talent with the different leagues and so many teams?
Banks 1958
Tatis’ .328 ISO is the best ever by a shortstop in a qualified season.
Crawford is just the 9th shortstop (3rd in the expansion era) with a 6 WAR season aged 34 or older. Of that group, he is the first to have had no previous 6 WAR seasons (Eddie Joost was previously the oldest shortstop to record a first 6 WAR season, at age 33; Joost added another at age 35)
Active players with qualified .325 BA seasons.
8 – Pujols
6 – Cabrera
3 – LeMahieu, Altuve
2 – Yelich, T. Turner (his third came in 324 PA in 2016)
1 – 18 players
Found Altuve and LeMahieu so far and… I can stop looking now.
Joey Votto has two qualified .324 BA seasons.
Charlie Blackmon also has two qualified seasons with at least a .324 BA, and Mike Trout has two at .323. While Robinson Cano has no .325 BA seasons, he was remarkably consistent with five qualified seasons between .313 and .320 in a six year stretch. He also hit .316 in 2020 but was four plate appearances shy of qualifying.
Banks 1958
1. Tatis
2. Soto
3. Crawford
4. Harper
5. Riley
6. Turner
7. Freeman
8. Goldschmidt
9. Albers
10. Posey
Tuna,
I’m assuming that vote at #9 is for Ozzie Albies, not Andrew Albers of the Twins, correct? Or is it supposed to be someone else entirely? Thanks!
Oops! Yes, that was meant to be for Ozzie Albies. I’ll need to wait for your American League MVP award post before I can consider voting for Andrew Albers. 😉 In the meantime, I can share a little about him for HHS readers who might not recognize his name.
I was surprised to see Albers resurface for a third stint with the Twins this summer. It made me recall the splash he made in his August, 2013 debut, finally getting his big league opportunity in his age 27 season. Despite his mid-80s fastball, he pitched like an MVP. No one before him won his first two major league appearances with 8+ scoreless innings and four hits or fewer yielded in each. That he struck out only two batters in each made his feat even more remarkable – and unsustainable. Though he remained in the rotation the rest of the season, his 2-0 record and 0.00 ERA slid to an unspectacular 2-5, 4.05 after eight more starts.
Aside from a respectable relief outing against the Yankees, it was only against your Brewers that Albers really shined this year, shutting them out on three hits over 5-1/3 innings for his lone victory in 2021. Three more appearances brought the expected regression to a final 1-2 record and 7.58 ERA.
Albers has enjoyed moments of brilliance amidst a career that has been the definition of replacement-level. His career pWAR now stands at exactly 0.0, overshadowed by his 0.2 bWAR, earned in 2017 with two sacrifices in three PA with Seattle and an RBI single in his only official AB. He is a pitcher with an 8-8 W-L record and a 92 ERA+; on the flip side, he is batting 1.000 with a 453 OPS+..
Thanks, Tuna!
I while I have no memory of his August ’13 debut, I do live in Twins Territory now, and have for all of the last 16 years. Plus I’m married to a Twins fan, and her father is a 100+ games a year viewer. So I do spend a lot of time on the Twins.
But I definitely remember that Albers game this year. In late August, the Brewers were still in a bit of a battle for playoff seeding. Only 2.5 back of the Dodgers and 5.5 back of the Giants, the Crew headed into Minnesota for what should’ve been an easy series win, if not sweep. The next series was against the Giants, where even more ground could be made up. And we were facing Andrew Albers! Unfortunately, the run distribution didn’t favor the Brewers in that three-gamer. They scored 2, 4, and 6 runs (respectively) to the Twins’ 2-6-2. I remember discussing with my dad how frustrating it is to outscore your opponents in a series, but distribute them into the wrong games. (And as people without an MLB.tv subscription, these were rare games we could watch on TV.) Of course, it all worked out (relatively) fine for the Brewers.
Unrelated fun fact about the Brewers:
The last four seasons, they’ve made the playoffs. They’ve lost to the eventual NL champion all four times: Atlanta in the DS this year, the Dodgers in the WC last year, Washington in the WC in ’19 (in a game the Brewers were winning in the ninth), and the Dodgers in the LCS in ’18. Their prior postseason appearance was in ’11, where they lost to the eventual NL champion Cardinals in the LCS. Before that? In 2008, they lost to the Phillies in the LDS… who won the NL. Every single one of those teams won the World Series, with the exception of the ’17 Dodgers. So as a fan, you just sit here and think, “We were as good as anyone that year, we just ran into the one team better.” In the era of expanded playoffs, I think you’re unlikely to find a longer streak than that. And if you’re a fan of an NL team, you should really hope you play (and beat) Milwaukee in the playoffs. It’s a pennant at the minimum.
My ballot.
Doug,
Any idea how the Giants’ over-age-30 cohort would rank by PA’s in the Crawford scenario above? Kapler must have done an incredible job….he didn’t quite do as well in Philadelphia 🙁
Sharp eye, Paul.
Split Finder shows the Giants as ranking 47th among playoff teams in PA for age 31+, all but 4 PA of which were for players aged 31-35. The Split Finder data are for season age (i.e. as of June 30th), while the game data was for age as of the date of the game. Adding in the PA for Giants aged 30 exactly (Yaz + Tauchman + a few pitchers) raises the PA total by 22%.
My ballot:
1) Harper
2) Tatis
3) Crawford
4) Soto
5) Turner
6) Riley
7) Goldschmidt
8) Freeman
9) India
10) Acuna
I kind of believe that the BBWAA voted accurately for the most part. I do firmly believe that Acuna wins this award, hands-down, if he stays healthy and Tatis and Harper, if they played 155-162 games, would finish 2nd and 3rd respectively. Corey Seager probably would have finished very high up, as well, if he had stayed healthy/played 155 games.
Acuna may have scored 135 runs; Tatis would have hit 50 home runs. Pretty impressive
Still a tight one here!
Let’s keep it open until tonight (12/10/21) at midnight, your local time (that’s on the honor system).
The results are in!
With five NL MVP voters, we have a clear-cut winner. As always, players are presented in order of finish, with total vote points (out of 70 possible), and 1st-place votes in parentheses:
The top six finishers each reached unanimity. Freeman and Goldschmidt were one shy (my bad). But while there was strong consensus on the names of the top finishers, it was a tight vote, and you can see that there wasn’t a strong consensus on the order. Tom’s ballot identified all of the 9 top finishers, while Paul E came reasonably close to naming the top 7 in order; one of theirs would have to be the consensus ballot. The bottom seven finishers all received only one vote each; the tiebreaker used was the one in which the earlier a player is named, the higher he scores in the voting.
Doom,
I saw you posted the Cy Young Awards…..were we going to do the AL MVP thing?
NL MVP is post #1, Cy Youngs are post #2, Rookies and Managers are post #3, and AL MVP is the grand finale!