How Not To Analyze Miguel Cabrera's MVP Win

As indeed I might have predicted in advance, I'm not entirely sure what to think about the American League Most Valuable Player race. I think I would have voted for Miguel Cabrera, who won, so I should be happy, but on the other hand, since I recognize that Mike Trout deserved the award at least as much as Cabrera, I'd've liked to see it a wee bit closer. But I do know some things that I definitely do not think about the race, and many of them are exemplified by this article on Slate, whose thesis is that, like Mitt Romney, Miguel Cabrera was the candidate of old white men, but unlike Romney, his electorate consisted mostly of that group, so he won while Romney lost.

Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.

This sentence in particular bothers me:

Miguel Cabrera’s voters are ink-stained traditionalists who long for a time before nerds ruined baseball by explaining how it worked.

Now, this might be descriptively true, although to be sure you'd need to look at the roughly two-dozen individuals who did vote for Cabrera and ask them why they voted the way they did. But it doesn't have to be true. It's perfectly possible, for example, to be perfectly aware of "how baseball works," as this author rather condescendingly puts it, and therefore to know that, in very meaningful senses, Cabrera just didn't come close to having as good a season as Trout, and yet to think that this does not settle the MVP case. Wins Above Replacement can claim, or at least come close to claiming, a rather natural monopoly on being the appropriate subject of analysis from the General Manager's vantage-point, i.e. in asking, which player will increase my team's win total by the most next year? But there's no particular reason to think that the GM mindset is the implicit criterion for the Most Valuable Player Award. And while I don't think it makes sense, for instance, to deny a pitcher the Cy Young Award because, while you cannot deny that their results were the best in the league, you dislike aesthetically their style of pitching, I do think it reasonable to say that the Triple Crown has a certain magic to it, that it constitutes a valid "intangible" which justifies, under the standard of reasonableness, a vote for Cabrera over Trout.

Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.