The Great MVP Debate

Comparisons may be odious. But dang it, they make great bar conversations. And few topics fuel debate more than comparing the inherent value/abilities of baseball players.

Since the American League Most Valuable Player in 2007 is ABSOLUTELY NOT UP FOR DEBATE (and if you somehow disagree with this absolute, you deserve a karate chop to the throat), we will move on to the National League MVP. Paul argues in favor of David Wright, while Coley touts the virtues of Matt Holliday.

PAUL SAYS:

Although the regular season has come and gone, it still seems that the general answer to the question “Who’s the NL MVP?” can vary daily. Simply put, there are far too many candidates. There’s Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins in Philadelphia. Chipper Jones had a tragically overlooked season for the Braves. There’s Prince Fielder for Milwaukee, Matt Holliday in Colorado, Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera for the Fish, David Wright, Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes in New York, and no MVP conversation is complete without mentioning Albert Pujols.

With so many candidates, I’m not going to bother going through each player’s credentials here. But I will explain why I feel that David Wright should be (but won’t be because putting numbers into context is too hard for BBWAA members to understand) your 2007 NL MVP.

The detractors will point to the fact (and perhaps fairly) that David Wright does not lead the league in anything that’s easy to compute. “Homeruns are the best a hitter can do, right? Then Wright can’t be the best because he only hit 30. And scoring runs are good too. He only brought home 103 of those!” But context, people, context!

Let’s begin with Park Factor. David Wright plays in the National League East – home of the pitcher’s park. Four of the five stadiums are disadvantageous to hitters. And looking at two ways to measure these things (at Baseball-Reference.com and ESPN), it appears that Shea may be the toughest of them all. This puts Wright at a severe disadvantage in terms of power numbers when compared to those who play in hitter’s parks such as Wrigley, Coors, Minute Maid, Great American, Chase, and Citizens Bank. Luckily for us, people far smarter than I have created ways to help equalize these numbers.

By now, I think most baseball fans have at least heard of things like Win Shares or VORP, either as respectable tools for evaluation or as the thing that’s destroying the very fiber of everything we’ve ever held dear. But as a quick recap, Win Shares was devised to calculate how much each individual player contributed (both offensively and defensively) to their team’s wins. Wright led the NL in Win Shares this year with 34, with Pujols behind him with 32. Basically, this means that Wright’s contributions to the Mets’ total number of wins outweighs that of any other player in the National League.

For VORP, Wright placed second behind Hanley Ramirez (who had an amazing offensive season) which is even more impressive once you consider that VORP does not calculate defensive value – an area that strongly divides Ramirez (arguably the worst defensive shortstop in MLB in 2007) and Wright (one of the best defensive 3rd baseman in the NL).

Then there’s Runs Created, another one of these wacky numbers made popular by Bill James, where we see literally how many runs scored were a direct result of each player’s offensive contributions. Wright leads the NL here too, barely over Miguel Cabrera (136 to 135), but again, when you take defense into account, Wright truly was the better player in 2007.

Lastly, Runs Above Average. This is a metric that figures out how many runs a player either created offensively or prevented defensively when compared to their positional peers. In 2007, David Wright was responsible for 73 Runs Above Average, which by far and away was tops in the NL (Pujols comes in second again with 60 RAA).

In 2007, David Wright did everything anyone could ask of him as an individual player. He hit for a very high average (.325), was one of the best at not making outs (.416 OBP), had 30 HRs and 34SBs (with an excellent stolen base success rate of 87%), hit with runners in scoring position (.310 AVG, .975 OPS), and played a very good 3rd base (he led all MLB 3rd baseman in the number of plays made outside of his zone. By a lot.). By pretty much all sabermetric measurements, David Wright was the best player in the 2007 National League.

COLEY SAYS:

Paul, I notice you’ve listed a lot of really good reasons why David Wright should be the NL MVP.

But I also notice you’ve omitted all the reasons why he shouldn’t. Like, for example, the fact that he played for the New York Mets.

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