With so much of society regressing these days, it’s encouraging that in a small area of American culture, things appear to be progressing: the voting record of the BBWAA. Today, they unveiled their pick for American League Most Valuable Player, Minnesota’s Joe Mauer.

Was the Mauer win a validation of the writers’ continued acceptance of what is commonly (and sometimes derisively) known as Sabermetrics? Whether grudgingly or willingly, the writers are apparently incorporating into their thinking more meaningful statistics and new ways of understanding the game they cover. Mauer was second in the league among non-pitchers in Wins Above Replacement (WAR), behind only Ben Zobrist, who is so obscure that most fans probably don’t even know what team he plays for. But this experiment lacks control: After all, Mauer led the league in batting average, a traditional mark of success, and his team went to the playoffs, another trusty MVP credential. Moreover, Derek Jeter, the putative challenger for the award, was himself third in WAR, making him a Sabermetrically defensible selection. So Mauer’s win didn’t necessarily prove anything about the impact of Sabermetrics in the establishment media.

As for our own methods, we have a simple but we think elegant way of determining the MVP, which combines Wins Above Replacement and Win-Probability Added: WAR + WPA. (It’s kind of an OPS for MVP candidates.) This is the fourth year we’ve put together our Sabermetric MVP rankings, and here’s what the American League looks like for 2009:

The pitcher whom the writers chose for Cy Young also was most valuable, by our lights (and it wasn’t even close). But perhaps Zack Greinke also winning the MVP was too much to hope for; he . Zobrist, whose respect is evidently still limited to Sabermetric quarters, produced both in the raw and in context. In other words, he wasn’t simply "playing for the stats"; he performed when his team needed it, positively impacting its chances of winning. Yet he finished a distant eighth in the voting. As for Mauer, he was certainly worthy but ranked only fourth; He alone of the top four, however, was the only one "electable," to use the contemporary political jargon. Writers may be willing to defend their pick of Tim Lincecum, but it’s hard to imagine anyone in the establishment media so willing to fall on his sword for the Sabermetric cause as to put Zobrist in one of his top three spots. It’s a long way from murmuring amen in a crowd to dying as a martyr all alone.

On a different note, it’s interesting to see that though the Yankees and Red Sox together accounted for eight of the top 20 and 10 of the top 25, three Mariners placed among the top 10 (and yet the team was 10 games under .500 by Pythagorean record). Mark Teixeira, the writers’ runner-up, was 13th; Miguel Cabrera and Kendry Morales, fourth and fifth, respectively, in the writer balloting, didn’t even make our top 20.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 4:35 pm 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.