The Deserving 2013 MLB Award Winners

Yesterday I wrote a post giving my opinion on the 2013 Silver Slugger Awards. (Spoiler: J.J. Hardy should not have been in the conversation, let alone won his.) Today I'll do the same thing for the six main end-of-year MLB awards: the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year Awards in each league, which have not yet been announced, though the identities of the top 3 vote-getters for each award have been made public in a totally lame attempt to build hype. As for Manager of the Year, well, there's no actual objective way to assess it, so who cares? Analysis below the fold.


Rookie of the Year
National League
Jose Fernandez, MIA.
This one is actually tough, because there's someone else who spent a lot of the year seeming like he was the obvious choice. I speak, of course, of Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers' phenom right-fielder who spent his first month or so in the major leagues hitting over .400. Puig is an impressive, dynamic player, and he had a damn good year in only part of the season, but his batting line ended up dropping to .319/.391/.534, which is merely "awesome" rather than "ungodly." Fangraphs pegs him at 4.0 WAR in 104 games. Fernandez, on the other hand, was 12-6 in 28 starts, with 187 strikeouts in 172.2 innings pitched against just 58 walks and 111 hits. (Yep, that's more K's than baserunners.) Oh, and he had an earned run average of 2.19. That would have led the Majors all but five times since 1998. It didn't this year because of the dude who should and will win the Cy Young, but it was pretty damn awesome. He's your ROY.

American League
Wil Myers, TBR.
Looks like Florida's got some good rookies. Myers hit .293/.354/.478 in 88 games, good for 2.4 fWAR for the right-fielder. That's pretty much All-Star-level production, you'll note. Now, Chris Archer, also of the Rays, had 2.7 fWAR (by runs allowed), but he played a fuller season so I think Myers was the most above-average rookie. Also, to the extent that Rookie of the Year is meant to be at all predictive, Myers seems like a real star going forward.

Cy Young Award
National League
Clayton Kershaw, LAD
Really? You want an explanation? How about... he led the Majors in ERA for the third straight year, only this time taking it all the way down to 1.83, the best since Pedro Martinez' insane 2000 campaign. He led the league in strikeouts and the majors in WHIP. And again by Fangraphs RA9-WAR, he put up an 8.8-win campaign, besting every other pitcher by at least two full wins. He didn't lead the league in wins, true, but you'd have to see wins as the only criterion for that to matter even a little bit, and that's implausible in light of the (justified) Felix Hernandez award a few years back. If Matt Harvey hadn't gotten injured this might've been a race, but he did so it isn't.

American League
Max Scherzer, DET.
This is a close one, actually. Scherzer, Yu Darvish, and Hisashi Iwamura were all awesome, notching between 6.2 and 6.8 fWAR by runs allowed. But Scherzer was 21-3, and was at one point something like 18-1. Wins aren't everything, but they're not nothing, and when it's as close as it is between these three I think you go with the guy with the best record. Plus, Scherzer had the best FIP of the lot. It all adds up, even if Darvish in particular is probably the best pitcher in the American League right now.

Most Valuable Player Award
National League
Andrew McCutchen, PIT.
This isn't close, or at least shouldn't be. He put up a .317/.404/.508 line while playing an above-average center field and stealing 27 bases. He's a classic five-tool player who's only getting better, and who led his team to their first winning season and first taste of the post-season in two decades. He ticks all the boxes, in other words. Paul Goldschmidt and Yadier Molina are the other "finalists," but neither of them comes particularly close to my mind. Honestly the only person who has a credible case to deserve this over McCutchen is Kershaw, and if McCutchen didn't exist I think I'd want to give it to Clayton over Goldschmidt or Molina. I'm honestly not sure whether the voters will do what I think they should here, though, and I think I've made pretty conventional choices for the ROYs and CYAs.

American League
Miguel Cabrera, DET.
It's deja vu all over again. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball, by a not-very-small margin. He had basically the same season as last year, a Willie Mays-esque campaign. But he's not gonna win, because Miguel Cabrera. For some reason I just can't resist giving the MVP to the guy who led all of baseball in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage all at once. Cabrera's been unambiguously the best hitter as such in the game for about four years. He's a one-dimensional player, whereas Trout is another classic five-tool player who adds value with everything he does. It's not fair that Trout hasn't won an MVP given how he's played the past two years, but, well, them's the breaks. Miggy won the Triple Crown last year and then got better this year, or at least he did until a late injury sapped his strength during September (and October, oops). I get the sense in which this isn't right, but that doesn't stop me from being in favor of it.


All of the people I think deserve to win are in fact in the top-3, so there weren't any overly egregious "snubs." And I'm reasonably certain that all of my picks other than McCutchen will in fact win. I wouldn't rule out a Molina win for NL MVP, though, which I think he arguably deserved last year but doesn't quite this year. Still, it looks like there won't be any outrageous awards handed out this year, nothing as bad as J.J. Hardy's Silver Slugger. Seriously, I'm never gonna get over that.