These days, the internet is chock-full of writers musing on whom the National League’s Most Valuable Player should be, ranging from Hanley Ramirez to Chipper Jones to Chase Utley. Yesterday, the P-D’s Derrick Goold threw his two cents into the debate. Since it’s nigh onto September, we figured it was all right to finally weigh in on the issue ourselves. Last year, as loyal readers may recall, we introduced a Sabermetric MVP system which combines Win Shares Above Bench and Win Probability Added, two metrics that we figure are the best attributes of an MVP candidate (we’re grateful to Dan Turkenkopf of Baseball Think Factory for helping tweak the formula, which is WSAB/3 + WPA). And the nominees are (Win Share data is through 8/23):

Last year’s NL race wasn’t nearly this close. And yet none of the big names — Fielder, Utley, Wright or Cabrera — is tops. It’s a pitcher, and in fact, two of the top three in our MVP rankings are pitchers. So why isn’t Jake Peavy getting more press? Albert Pujols isn’t far off the pace; we’ll see whether his nagging right hamstring curtails his MVP candidacy.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.