SaberMets.com

« Bonds Still The Man | Main | Let The Lunacy Begin »

Some People Still Don't Get It

Jayson Stark is totally clueless. In his latest nonsensical diatribe, Jayson pleads his case to the masses regarding what true "value" is. Not unexpectedly, he carts out the old standbys when suggesting how everyone should quantify this "value":

1) How have all the other voters defined it over the last 70 years? and
2) Where would this player's team have finished without him?

Jayson is not an old-timer, but he subscribes to oh-so-many of the old-timer baseball adages. I'm not saying he's wrong in his thinking because his opinion differs from my own. He's wrong for any number of other reasons, so why single one out? Here's an analogy that I just conjured up:

Let us suppose there are two men: one wealthy, one not so. The wealthy man is worth $1,000,000, while the poor man is worth a mere $1,000. Walking along one day, the wealthy man finds $90 on the sidewalk, and picks it up. Across town, the poor man finds $100 on the sidewalk, and picks it up. By Jayson's logic, the $90 is more valuable to the wealthy man than the $100 is to the poor man because, after all, he would still be poor without that extra $100. As we all know, the $100 is, at its simplest, more valuable by $10 than the $90. One might even argue that, on a different level, it's significantly more valuable, with the importance that it holds in the hands of the poor man. Why, the wealthy man has $90 many times over, while the $100 truly makes a world of difference to the poor man.

Analogy Key
Wealthy Man - First Place Minnesota Twins
Poor Man - Last Place Texas Rangers
$90 - would-be MVP candidate Shannon Stewart (though it's probably more like $50)
$100 - Alex Rodriguez

Hopefully it's starting to sink in. I generally enjoy Jayson's writing, but his current agenda leaves me scratching my head. He even rips his ESPN.com co-columnist Peter Gammons (amongst others) for not knowing "...what "valuable" means in this goofy world we live in." He goes on to use loaded arguments, such as this gem:

It tells us that hundreds of voters, over more than seven decades, almost always thought "valuable," as it applied to this award, meant a player's team at least won more games than it lost. Ideally, it contended for or finished first.

If we're wrong about that, then how come the voters for this award defined it that way for just about everyone else in the American League?

Of the 26 players besides A-Rod who got a vote, only two -- Anaheim's Garret Anderson and (hold your chuckles, please) Tampa Bay's Aubrey Huff -- played for teams with losing records.

Of course he doesn't mention that the main reason teams lose more games than they win is because they don't have very good players. This fact eludes Stark (or at least it eludes his argument), who is still campaigning door-to-door for Shannon Stewart. That he would take a cheap shot at Aubrey Huff like this ("...hold your chuckles...") is not only foolish, but misplaced. He fails to mention that Huff bested his choice, Stewart, in almost every conceivable category. He had a 3 point edge in OBP, a 96 point edge in SLG, a 99 point edge in OPS, a 4 point edge in AVG, 21 more homeruns, 34 more RBI, and an extra run. His RARP was a whopping 27 runs higher and he had 3 more Win Shares.

He concludes his sermon with this:

He won because nobody had any idea who to vote for. So they handed the best player in the league a consolation prize, a career-achievement award, a picturesque-numbers trophy, a We're Sorry You Never Won Before award. It was a magnanimous gesture and a fine little tip of the cap to a great, great player. Except that's not what the MVP award is. It's supposed to be about this year, about which team won and which teams didn't and about which player had the most to do with that.

Much as the two writers who left Hideki Matsui off of their ROY ballots because they felt the need to redefine the criteria for the award, Stark seems to want to re-christen this award the MVPWT, or Most Valuable Player on a Winning Team, which it is clearly not intended to be. As Rob Neyer points out in his rebuttal:

The Rangers finished in fourth place, which happens to be last place in the American League West. If they'd played in the American League Central, they'd probably have finished third, ahead of two or three other teams. Would that change Jayson's opinion of Alex Rodriguez's "value?" And if it would, then I submit that this house of cards, atop which Jayson's definition of "value" rests, has just collapsed under its own illogical weight.

That's better than I could have said it.