Mr Weatherby

I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between the subset of people who read this blog and the subset of people who care about baseball, but whatever. I’m writing about baseball anyway. Really though, I’m sure you can make connections as to how it applies to other things if you want, things you find more relevant to your life. Football, maybe.

So here’s the deal: at the end of a given baseball season, they hand out awards to players for outstanding individual accomplishments of different types: some for pitchers, some for new players, some for hitters, for fielders, and so on. The most prestigious, for which all players are eligible, is the MVP, or Most Valuable Player. It’s like the Nobel prize of Major League Baseball, at least as far as specific players are concerned.

Baseball fans and “experts” like to engage in speculation about the eventual winner of this award, well in advance of the end of the season. The great charm of baseball, really, is the pursuit of hypotheticals, and this one is a classic. Debates are more engaging when there are camps and paradigms, and the MVP debate has them with gusto. I’d like to talk briefly about how the one I don’t belong to is silly and wrong.

What this comes down to, I think, is what is meant by the term value. At least I hope that’s what it comes down to, because sometimes I’m afraid it’s just a matter of widespread failure to think carefully about the situation, but let’s give the rubes as much credit as possible, at least for the purpose of discussion. Some would say that value is how much a player contributes to a team’s capacity to win ballgames. Other people seem to think value is some kind of interactive product between a team’s total accomplishments and the relative contribution of any one of its players, or something like that. The bottom line is that a lot of folks will insist that someone should not be recognized as the most valuable player if his team didn’t do well. These people make me angry.

I hope a brief metaphor will illustrate my position here. Let’s say that you and I collect baseball cards, and we go in to our local card shop and have our collections appraised. The shopkeeper says that all of the cards we have brought him are worth between a nickel and two dollars, with the exception of one card that’s worth ten. Now then, reader, I ask you: which is the MVC (most valuable card)? If your answer starts with “well, that depends on which collection is worth most in total,” I want you to go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done. It’s the ten dollar card.

I can understand, sort of, the argument that “value” should reflect a players value in practice, to the specific team that employs him. Of course, this would actually lead one to vote for guys on bad teams, not good ones. If you have a team full of guys who should be playing in a corn field in Toledo, plus Babe Ruth, that team won’t do particularly well. However, if you take Ruth out of the lineup, they would lose virtually their entire capacity to score runs. Ruth is probably more valuable to them than anyone else is to his respective team, and Ruth is more valuable to his team than he would be to any other team. This is a perfectly reasonable standard, by which it is perfectly reasonable to name Ruth the most valuable player, even if Barry Bonds had a better season, but it was while playing for a team full of stars.

There are not legions of people out there that say the MVP should go to the biggest star on the most incompetent team, as this line of reasoning would support. There are, however, people who try to use this line of reasoning to support the case of players on the best teams. They seem to assume that the only variation in talent and productivity exists between people about whom they are speculating; Batting Bob and Swinging Steve are both great players, and one of them will be the MVP, but everyone else in the league is part of an army of mass-produced, identical automatons. In this case, sure, the fact that Batting Bob made the playoffs while Swinging Steve didn’t is admissible evidence, because they had the same thing to work with. We’ve controlled for all the potentially intervening variables. Of course, every single player has some different productive value, and no one player has the single-handed capacity to ensure the pennant for his team, so it really doesn’t matter what the teams did — you just have to figure out which player performed best over the course of the season. I really don’t think it’s that complicated.

Tags: baseball