Cy Young – Player of the Year – MVP problem solved.

This year at the end of baseball season a discussion popped up for the umpteenth time concerning the appropriateness of a pitcher winning the Most Valuable Player Award. Most position players would argue a pitcher should not win because pitchers already have their own award in the Cy Young and are not deserving anyway because they only pitching one fifth of a teams’ total innings at most.

So maybe my solution is overly simplistic or I just probably missed something.

Why not have:

the Cy Young go to the best pitcher,

the Player of the Year go to the best player, (the word player implying not a pitcher)

and the MVP go to the person who was the most valuable to a competitive teams’ success, whether it be pitcher or hitter.

That’s it.
Piece of cake.

Salary v PED

Performance Enhancing Drugs is a topic that is ugly.  It has perverted the entire historical statistical record book and although people are tired of talking about the subject, it will not go away slowly.  Artificially enhancing the human condition to gain an unfair advantage in a competitive environment thats validity is based on sportsmanship and fair play strikes at the soul of the sports integrity.  The very idea that the general public was able to recognize such a subversion in the multi billion dollar national pastime was an enormous black eye to the American psyche, never to disappear.  The record books are forever tarnished because their is no way to differentiate between which statistics should count.  These guys had an edge, an unfair advantage based on an a playing field that was not level.

For the past 20 years the payroll of the New York Yankees has exceed the median salary of major league teams and was usually greater by 200 to 300 percent.  I recently read excerpts from a couple of PhDs from Washington University doing a research paper on MLB statistics and how certain things such as home runs and winning percentage correlated with attendance and salaries.  Their findings were pretty much as I would have anticipated however I do am not sure their analytics were guided from sound baseball insights in that they found the differences to be negligible.  I beg to differ.

When a baseball team has the highest team salary every year and usually by a large margin because the profit margin of winning in a  major market justifies any financial penalty your team may not finish in the playoffs every year.  However, it is a pretty fair bet that a team with the highest salary is in the playoffs far more frequently than a team that is not.  It is also a pretty fair bet that the team with the highest salary will more great hitters than teams that don’t.  This translates to better regular season numbers because a batter who is protected by a great hitter in the batting line up his entire career will see better pitches to hit because the opposition cannot afford to pitch around him translates to elevated career stats.  Further, if your team is in the postseason disproportionately to every one else because you bought better players, which translated to more wins, more titles and more post season appearances, then the post season records for things like career appearances, career hits, career anything in the post season is skewed.

This does not seem like apple and oranges to me.  In one case individuals gain a statistical and unethical edge by using a drug.  in the other case teams gain a statistical and unethical edge by using money .

Why Jeter is not as great as you might think

Just recently Derrick Jeter retired. He is a baseball legend and revered by the vast majority of folks. Me, not so much.
It is not so much whether Jeter was a great player or not, he was obviously very good. However there are numerous considerations that seem to be ignored when his name comes up in a comparative regarding baseball greats.
1) Derrick Jeter played for the New York Yankees for 20 years mainly hitting 2nd in the lineup. During his career the Yankee team salary consistently ranked at the top of team salaries by a considerable margin. In fact sometimes their team salary was 8 to 10 times that of some of the other major league teams. Unlike the salary caps in all major sports, baseball has little regard for maintaining a competitive balance. For some teams, the economic benefit is so great in marketing, they can actually lose money on the playing field and make it up on the back end.
Why is this topical, because, the statistical impact benefit a 2nd in the order hitter receives by virtue of an entire career hitting in front of great 3rd and 4th and 5th place hitter is undeniable and prejudicial.
2) Of secondary but no less impactful is the absolute ridiculous statistical impact on post season records a player can potentially have if they have a huge financial roster advantage in affect altering a level playing field into one that is dramatically lopsided. The Yankees literally bought Jeter’s way into the postseason record books from a career records analysis
3) Omar Visquel won the gold glove for being the outstanding fielding shortstops for a number of years. The year he lost it was won by Alex Rodriguez who won it again the following year. At the time Alex Rodriguez was considered possibly the greatest hitting shortstop ever and a great fielder as well. When he signed with the Yankees he was moved to third base so Jeter (a career below average fielder for his position) could play shortstop. So instead of doing the sound strategy of having the greatest hitting combination in the game of Jeter at 2nd Rodriguez at ss, they Yankees operated on ego and made the better player move.
It’s not that Jeter wasn’t good, he just wasn’t as good as people think.   http://www.danoettel.com