On Yoenis Cespedes and the MVP

So. .312/.357/.675. 36 runs driven, and 33 scored, in over 36 games. 14 homers, three triples, and nine doubles over that time. Four stolen bases, never caught stealing (for what that's worth). Mostly while playing center field, and providing dynamic defense in center or in left. That's what Yoenis Cespedes has done since coming to the New York Mets. Oh, and since they acquired him (including one game after the trade but before Cespedes got to the team) the Mets are 26 and 11. They've surged from two game behind the Washington Nationals to seven games up on them, including going 6-0 against the Nationals themselves. Before they got Cespedes, Baseball Prospectus gave the Mets just a 26.8% chance of seeing the Division series; now (not even including tonight's win) that's up to 94.6%. And Cespedes has been everywhere. He had a home run and also a run-scoring double in Monday's game, hit a big two-out, bases-clearing double in last night's game to get the Mets all the way back from a 7-1 deficit to trailing by just a single run (and would later score the tying run), and tonight he absolutely crushed a hanging slider off Drew Storen for a two-run shot to give the Mets a lead they would not relinquish in the 8th.

It's got people, at least Mets people, talking about Yoenis Cespedes for National League Most Valuable Player. Which, y'know. He wasn't in the National League on July 30th. Gary Cohen was saying after tonight's game that he had been thinking over the Cespedes-for-MVP chatter prior to the game and was skeptical, but then Cespedes was the hero yet again, and at some point you just have to wonder. Especially since the guy who's having the absolutely bonkers season, hitting .336/.467/.657 including a heroic if futile 10-total-bases effort tonight against the Mets, is Bryce Harper, who plays for the Washington Nationals, who have just suffered a miserable collapse. Harper is unambigously the best player in baseball this year (his full-season line is better than Cespedes's line with just with the Mets), but sometimes best players in baseball don't win the MVP if their team disappoints. So that makes you start to wonder whether there's a window for a non-traditional candidacy from Yoenis. And for what it's worth, his whole-season stats are MVP-worthy, if divided between two leagues. Including his numbers with the Tigers Cespedes is hitting .298/.333/.554 with 32 homers, 37 doubles, 5 triples (for 74 total extra-base hits), 95 runs scored, and 97 runs driven in. FanGraphs credits Cespedes with 2.6 Wins Above Replacement with the Mets so far, and 6.6 WAR on the season. That's a very MVP pace; indeed, his Mets pace is at peak Ruth/Bonds levels.

Now, this is not necessarily the only kind of argument one could make, and there's certainly plenty of reason to think that past years' MVP voting practices were quite flawed, but it's interesting, I think, to look at other players who've done something like what Cespedes is up to. Here are three examples from the last decade-plus:



Two of them are from 2008. That year, Manny Ramirez was traded at the deadline from the American League Boston Red Sox to the National League Los Angeles Dodgers. In 53 games with the Dodgers, Manny merely hit .396/.489/.743, hitting 17 homers and driving in 53. FanGraphs had Manny at 3 WAR in his two months with the Dodgers. For the whole season he hit .332/.430/.601 with 37 homers, 102 runs scored, and 121 driven in, and put up 5.9 WAR. Also that year, though slightly before the deadline, CC Sabathia was traded from the Cleveland Indians in the AL to the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL. Sabathia went 11-2 down the stretch for the Brewers with a 1.65 ERA. Also he was pitching on short rest routinely, including on the last day of the season when he pitched a complete game to put the Brewers a game in front of the Mets for the Wild Card. FanGraphs had Sabathia at 5.8 WAR* with the Brewers, and 8.3 for the whole season (over which he was 17-10 with a 2.70 ERA).

Then there's 2004 Carlos Beltran, acquired by the NL's Houston Astros from the AL's Kansas City Royals a little over a month before the deadline. All Beltran did in Houston was hit .258/.368/.559 with 23 homers, 7 triples, 17 doubles, 28 steals (and caught zero times), 53 RBIs, and 70 runs scored in 90 games, all while playing his characteristic (though not yet formally recognized) Gold Glove center field defense. And that's not even counting his bonkers post-season run. For the whole year he hit .267/.367/.548 with 38 homers, 104 RBIs, and 121 runs scored. Overall he was worth 6.4 WAR, and 4.0 of those came with the Astros.

All of these are pretty analogous to the Cespedes situation, assuming he keeps it up for the whole of September. Players traded from one league to the other (as it happens, all from the junior to the senior circuit) who went nuts for their new team, put up plausible MVP numbers over the whole year but absolutely insane ones in partial seasons within their new team's actual league, and led their teams to the playoffs. And all were necessary to their teams' reaching the playoffs. The 2004 Astros won the Wild Card by one game over the San Francisco Giants. The 2008 Dodgers won their division by 2 games over the Arizona Diamondbacks. And, of course, the Brewers that year finished precisely one game ahead of the Mets for the Wild Card spot, goddamn it. (I remember scoreboard-watching that final Sabathia start very well. It was agonizing.)

So the question (for doctrinal argument, anyway) is where they finished in the MVP voting. The answer is that Beltran finished 12th, in a year where he and everyone else in the league had no shot because of Barry Bonds and his .609 OBP and his .812 SLG. (Yeah. Wow. That's unreal. I've known about that for years and it still seems unreal.) A whole bunch of other players had more-or-less MVP-caliber seasons for the whole year, though, and rounded out the top-6: Beltre, Pujols, Rolen, Edmonds, Drew. In 2008, meanwhile, Albert Pujols won it, and deservedly so, while Manny finished fourth (behind Pujols, Ryan Howard, and Ryan Braun), and Sabathia finished sixth (also behind Berkman). Interestingly Sabathia finished only 5th in the Cy Young Award voting, despite having half as many players to compete against.

So what we see, I think, is that yes, Yoenis Cespedes should definitely get some MVP votes. But probably not any first-place votes (none of Beltran, Sabathia, or Ramirez got a single first-place vote), and he definitely shouldn't win the award, or come particularly close. A top-10 finish seems entirely reasonable; maybe a top-5 finish if he really keeps this up. (Although the way the Mets are going, it's likely that Cespedes's own raw production won't have been necessary to winning the division. Certainly it's not right now, with a 7-game lead.) Realistically that should still be Harper--although there is a case for Anthony Rizzo, who has more Win Probability Added than Harper and is on a playoff team. But that's a post for another day, and one that I probably won't be the one to write.