I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without blogging more about the Minnesota Twins since I’m such an obsessed fan. I would say I know more about the Twins that practically anyone, but there are so many people blogging about the Twins now and they seem to know which Class A pitcher has the best curveball, so I don’t think I quite compare. I do watch most every game (though only parts of games – basically whenever my girls aren’t demanding my attention) and I read a ton about the Twins. I probably waste 15 minutes of each day during the season (ok, and spring training too) reading up on the Twins. I usually end up reading the following – Star Tribune Twins section, Aaron’s Baseball Blog, the Pioneer Press Twins section and occasionally I stop over to BatGirl when I need less stats and more sass.
When Justin Morneau was named MVP on Tuesday, I had to take time out of my busy day off to read all the write-ups of his winnings. A couple sites were quite hard on the selection calling it one of the worst of all time. I must admit that I personally didn’t think Morneau was the best player in his own house this past year (he lives with Joe Mauer), so I had a tough time going along with the selection. He did beat Derek Jeter however, and since he plays for my favorite team, I’m going to be happy about it anyway.
If I had a vote, I would’ve voted for Joe Mauer. I understand those who wanted to vote for the power hitter, so I don’t have a problem with those voting for the Morneau’s and Ortiz’ of the world, but I have trouble understanding why people could vote for Jeter over Mauer. Let’s break down the most important components of the award balloting:
Player — Mauer — Jeter
BA — .347 — .344
On-base – .429 — .417
Slugging – .507 — .483
Pos. — C — SS
Def. rating Best — Avg
As you can see from above, Mauer bested Jeter in the three most important hitting categories, and he also played a more demanding position better than average (even though Jeter won the Gold Glove award at SS, his defense is considered average to slightly below average by all in depth fielding research). The only two places where Jeter out-did Mauer was in stolen bases (by a good margin, but anyone who watched Mauer understands he has an excellent head on the basepaths) and games played. Since Mauer is a catcher, he essentially has a ceiling on the number of games played that’s less than another position player. No primary catcher played more than 144 games out of a 162 game season last year. So I don’t know how a catcher can win if he can beat the top competition in all the hitting categories but not be considered a viable candidate because he didn’t play enough games. What more can he do?
Considering the "most valuableness" of Mauer versus Jeter – there’s no question the impact on the Twins would be much more severe if you took aware Mauer than if you took Jeter away from the Yankees. I think they have some guy at 3B who could maybe slide over and do OK if Jeter were to be out of the lineup.
Getting back to Morneau – it seems the beat writers who vote on this award simply listen to the team and their advice on the award. When Mauer, Morneau and Santana were all being mentioned as possible MVP candidates near the end of the season, I think the team got together and decided they were going to push Morneau publicly as their choice, so the three teammates didn’t end up splitting the votes. It makes sense to me from a team perspective, and the reason they chose Morneau was because he was the guy with the most RBIs. Any cursory look at the past MVP awards shows that the award may as well be named, "The Guy with the Most RBIs on the Team That Finished in First". With few exceptions it seems to follow that format. I was impressed the the voters didn’t make the mistake in the NL last year when they chose Pujols over Andruw Jones even though Jones had 11 more RBIs and each team won their division.
I thought it was interesting to see all of the ballots from each of the beat writers – click here. As Aaron Gleeman noted in his baseball blog, the Joe Cowley ballot from Chicago was perhaps the most ridiculous – he gave Jeter a 6th place vote and didn’t vote for Mauer at all – even though he gave AJ Pierzynski a 10th place vote. This had to be some kind a favor to AJ since Mauer dominated him in all statistical categories. Anyone who completely ignores reality such as this should be banned from voting in the future. That’s the least they could do to reform the process.
Anyway, I need to leave the debate alone and just say "Congratulations Justin" – it’s good to see a Twin win.
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