Did Somebody Say "Forgotten MVP Season"?

MLB.com currently features a link to this piece, dedicated to the proposition that Derek Jeter is underrated (or at least that he once was). How, you might wonder, do they defend this remarkable assertion? Because in 1999, when Jeter narrowly led all American League position players in bWAR and trailed Manny Ramirez by a tenth of a point in fWAR, he didn't win the Most Valuable Player award, or even finish in the top-5 in voting. Instead, Texas Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez won the award, while Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, who had one of the best pitching seasons of all time (and then followed it up with a similarly-dominant one the next year), finished second. Proof positive!, says this piece, that Jeter gets no respect.

Now, I could try to construct some arguments for why Jeter's low finish that year was deserved. He tailed off significantly in the second half, his OPS dropping from a ridiculous 1.065 to .903 (which is admittedly still great, but less absurdly great, particularly for 1999). His team had the best record in the American League, and would've needed to finish twelve games worse than it did to miss the post-season, so while it's true, as the article says, that Jeter was the best player on a winning team, it's also true that he didn't make much of a marginal difference in that team's regular-season outcome. (Obviously that form of that argument is a bit ludicrous, and I don't know if the same great-team penalty that Dave Cameron found in Manager of the Year voting has historically applied to MVP voting, but it's a logical extension of the things people said about why Mike Trout shouldn't win his awards.) Then there's the fact that, if we're talking about value as value, there's no plausible argument that anyone not named Pedro should've won that award.

And then there's the fact that WAR likely understates, perhaps significantly, the impact of a great defensive catcher like Ivan Rodriguez. I don't have any pitch-framing numbers from 1999, but I bet he was pretty good at it, and there's reason to think that the best pitch framers add a ton of value that way. The idea that catchers should get extra credit is a remarkably venerable one; Roy Campanella won three MVP awards while having only one league lead in any one major stat in those three years, while Yogi Berra won his three MVP awards without leading the league in anything the whole time. Neither was anywhere near the league lead in WAR. Pudge Rodriguez was way closer to the league WAR lead in 1999 than either Campanella or Berra were in any of their MVP seasons. So if Rodriguez was an undeserving winner that year, the Yankees should give back some hardware of their own.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about, not in the main. No, I'd like to talk about a different league and a different New York team, and a few different players who got a lot less MVP respect than they deserved. In 1998, John Olerud hit .354/.447/.551 and put up 8.1 fWAR/7.6 bWAR. That put him third in the National League per Fangraphs, behind Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire by half a win, and second per Baseball-Reference, half a win behind Bonds. But he only hit 22 home runs, not being part of the insane record chase of McGwire and Sosa, and his blend of pure hitting and great first base defense got so little respect that he finished a whopping 12th in the voting. Oh, and did I mention that, while the Mets didn't make the post-season that year, they did win 88 games, climbing out of a slump that had consumed the first two-thirds of that decade, finishing a game out of the Wild Card tie, and launching one of the best eras the team had ever seen? Sosa won the award, and it's tough to complain about that, but Olerud at least should've been near the top of the ballot.

Or how about eight years later, when Carlos Beltran hit 41 home runs and hit .275/.388/.594 while playing Gold Glove defense in center field? His 8.2 bWAR were second in the league, barely behind Albert Pujols, and his 7.6 fWAR was likely second behind Albert, though by a bigger margin. Oh, and the Mets made the post-season. In fact they dominated, winning 97 games and leading the entire league by nine victories. Beltran finished fourth in the voting. The next season, which the Mets spent in the thick of contention, Beltran's teammate David Wright hit .325/.416/.546, had a 30/30 season (30 home runs, 34 stolen bases), and also won a Gold Glove, deservingly. His 8.3 bWAR was second behind Pujols, while Fangraphs thought his 8.4 WAR led the league by half a win. And while it's true that the Mets suffered an ignominious collapse to miss the playoffs, Wright was no part of that: he hit .352/.432/.602 in September, and .397/.451/.575 during the 17-game collapse itself. He did an almost inhuman job of trying to carry his team, and it's hardly his fault that it wasn't quite enough. He likewise finished fourth in the voting. Who won these MVPs? Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies. Wright led Rollins by about 2 WAR by either metric, and Beltran led Howard by something like two or three wins. But Howard put up goofy home run and RBI numbers, and Rollins hit 20 triples and 30 homers while playing a good shortstop--and for the team that snuck past the Mets. So despite having the best position player (modulo Pujols) in the league two consecutive years, the Mets didn't even get a top-3 MVP finish out of things.

And then there's the curiosity that is Bernard Gilkey, 1996. In his first season with the Mets, the left fielder hit 30 home runs and 44 doubles en route to a .317/.393/.562 slash line, and also (so say the metrics) fantastic defense. He was right around the league lead in WAR by a position player not named Barry Bonds, with Baseball-Reference putting him a tenth of a point ahead of Ellis Burks and Fangraphs putting him the same distance behind Jeff Bagwell. Now I'm not saying he should've won the MVP. I mean, Bonds should've, and other than that, Mike Piazza should've. It's absurd that Ken Caminiti in fact did. But perhaps the guy who had one of the most productive seasons in the league should've finished a bit higher up than 14th?

That's four times that a Met has been either arguably the best position player in the National League or arguably the best position player in the National League who wasn't Bonds or Pujols (and we all know guys like that get held to a higher standard for winning MVPs). The best any of them did was fourth place in the voting. One of them finished outside the top-10 despite his team's having been in the thick of playoff contention, out of nowhere, all season long. So if we want to talk about "forgotten MVP seasons," let's not talk about Derek Jeter. The other side of that "most saturated media market in the country" can boast not one, not two, not three, but four MVP-caliber years that were already forgotten while they were happening over the span of barely more than a decade.

And none of those four players possess a single absurdist Gold Glove either, let alone five.

If You Want to Subtract the Steroid Guys, You Should Add Someone in Their Place

Well, that was anticlimactic. No one got voted into the Hall of Fame this afternoon. No one. From a ballot with quite a few of the greatest names in baseball history on it. Not Bonds, not Clemens, not Sosa or McGwire or Palmeiro. Not Biggio or Bagwell, or Mike Piazza. Not Jack Morris or Tim Raines or Lee Smith. Not Curt Schilling or Edgar Martinez or Alan Trammell, or Larry Walker or Fred McGriff or Dale Murphy, who was in his last year of elligibility (though he by no means deserved to get in). No one. Since I would have voted for quite a few of those players, obviously I disagree with that outcome, most emphatically when it comes to my favorite player, Mike Piazza, the best-hitting catcher of all time. At least there's always next year.

But I do have one point I want to make, which is that any voter who wants to weed out the steroid users and vote against them on the grounds that they cheated really ought to find replacement people to put in in their stead. Now, some of the voters said that they just plain refuse to vote for anyone who played in the Steroid Era at all, which strikes me as being deliberately unfair to any player who played clean and was therefore the victim of all the cheating. I am not addressing those voters; there would be no point, other to say that they're being pompous, obnoxious, and mean. No, this point concerns only those voters who believe that all and only those players who we have decent reason to believe were themselves cheating should be excluded from the Hall. Those voters should, in my opinion, couple their withholding of votes for the likes of Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. (and hopefully they'll leave Piazza off that list in the future) with the awarding of votes to some guys who would have looked a whole lot better had Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. not been in the league playing the way they did.

Take John Olerud, for example. Over a 17-year career spanning 2234 games, in which he had 9063 plate appearances and 7592 at-bats, Olerud had 2239 hits, of which 13 were triples, 255 were home runs, and 500 were doubles. He scored 1139 runs and drove in 1230 runs. He drew 1275 walks but only struck out 1016 times. All that is good for a .295/.398/.465 batting line, which is good all-around but in particular is an elite on-base percentage, the 31st best in the integration era (1947 onwards). Olerud was an integral part of not one but two championship teams with the Blue Jays and the nearly-championship 1999 Mets. He won a batting title, hitting .363 in 1993, and in a sense deserved to win another, hitting .354 in 1998 and finishing second behind Larry Walker's Coors Field-aided .363. In each of those years he was clearly an MVP-level player, and in quite a few other years he was an All Star-level player. And while he was a first baseman, he was a really really good defensive first baseman, winning three Gold Gloves, probably deserving quite a few more, and (according to Baseball Reference) contributing almost enough high-quality defense to cancel out the penalty for being a first baseman in the first place.

All that adds up, according to Baseball Reference, to 53.7 career wins above replacement and 27.4 wins above average. Those are borderline Hall of Fame numbers, and probably slightly on the wrong side of the border. But keep in mind, WAR is an adjusted-for-league-average stat. And Olerud was playing in a league full of cheaters, like McGwire and Palmeiro and Sosa and Bonds. They make his adjusted numbers, which are already on the borderline for Hall consideration, look worse than they should be. And he was playing in a league full of cheaters like Roger Clemens, who he faced 107 times, more than any other pitcher, and against whom he hit just .205/.335/.373. So, first, Olerud's numbers are worsened because a good chunk of the pitchers he faced were cheating, and second his numbers get worsened again in the adjustment process because he gets compared to other hitters who were cheating. What that means, I think, is that if you want to try to pretend the steroid thing never happened, i.e. to imagine that all the cheating players just hadn't been there, John Olerud has a pretty strong Hall of Fame case.

Now, you don't necessarily have to agree with me about Olerud. But I think the basic principle is sound: if you're the kind of voter who wants to go through the list of great players from the previous two decades who might look like they deserve induction and strike the names of anyone we have sufficient reason to believe used steroids, you ought also to take a second look at players like Olerud, and see whether they deserve a few bonus points for having been really really good while playing clean in a league of cheaters. Merely subtracting is not enough; you should add something back as well.