MVP and Cy Young by WPA

Hey, I didn't make the list. I'm actually a big supporter of Jimmy Rollins for MVP.

I think having three contenders from the same team hurts each one of them. Doesn't that mean the team would be almost as good if one of them were gone since there are two more terrific players on the team? On the other hand, remove any of those guys on the lists in this article and the team isn't nearly as good.

No...i'm not disagreeing...i just thought it was interesting Tyler

better yet...David wright also isn't there...

That's fine, but look at the winners (at least for the actual words). Pretty damn close to the actual candidates thrown around. Carmona is probably the longest shot, but he's at least in the conversation.

The fact is that again, this whole debate revolves around your definition of "valuable". Are there non-quantitative ways that a particular player can contribute to his team's success? Probably. But what is the impact of those?

Besides, statistics have been how we've looked at the value of a player for THE ENTIRETY OF BASEBALL HISTORY. If you hate statistical attempts to quantify player skill, then I never want to hear you talk about batting average, or ERA, or any of that. I will never say that statistics can make things like scouting or something like that obsolete, but the fact is that statistics are inextricable from baseball, and you have to learn to accept that. You know what, I lied. It's not fine, like I said at the top.

I think I rephrase my comment.

Statistics are a great way to support an argument when it comes to things like how good is player A compared to player B. It's a good way to empirically assess a player's value. But the assessment can't be JUST statistics. Statistics should support arguments, not BE arguments.

And I just don't think there's any way to quantify a player's contributions to a win or to winning. It's a team sport, even though it is divided into individual accomplishments. Nevertheless, those individual accomplishments build on each other. Example: Player A hits a single with 1 out and 0 on. How valuable is that? If he's hitting in front of A-Rod, it's more valuable than if he's hitting in front of Doug Mientkiewicz. But it's still the same accomplishment: a single.

Am I making sense? I'm not asking if you agree, I just want to make sure my point is coming across.

Example: Player A hits a single with 1 out and 0 on. How valuable is that? If it's the home team in the first inning in a tie game, it is worth precisely .029 of a win.

You're going to have to explain to me how that works.

Check out this article from The Hardball Times.

Thank you for the explanation. That's what I thought it was, a figure calculated by comparing an accomplishment to a large number of previous accomplishments in previous similar situations.

It makes sense, and it's interesting that the top candidates for these awards have very good WPAs.

However, my problems with this stat remain. I think it is impossible to accurately quantify the value of any accomplishment by an individual in a team sport. I also think every situation in the history of baseball has been a first time situation. Hitters learn and adapt, as do pitchers and managers.

The thing about it being a team sport is valid to a certain extent, but baseball is the most individual of the team sports. Something like this would be impossible to determine for basketball or football.

I also don't claim that it's perfect, I just claim that it's better than some arbitrary method.

Actually, this is another arbitrary method - you are just putting forward an alternate arbitrary method that attempts to measure how players perform relative to the leverage of the situation. It's probably as valid or more valid than just voting for the guy with 20 wins or the guy with the best ERA or the most K/9.

Woodsmeister -- it's not an arbitrary method. It's a rigorously researched and mathematically grounded method based on decades of data.

Again, this method works. Look at the names it generated.

3 reasons:

All games are decided on the field...statistics are merely reactionary...

Gives something for people to write about w/o actually writing ; - )

Doesn't solve inherent problems with the initial question...like being the MVP of your team is usually fairly evident...both in feeling and stats...we could easily name the MVP of each team without much difficulty...

But to be MVP of the league...the problem is already inherent...what is an MVP of the league...is it the guy most valuable to his team...or the league...what if his team really blows...but he was awesome...etc...

I guess statistics are reactionary, but that's because of the fact that they describe what happened on the field. I think the problem here is that there a fundamental disconnect between using statistics to describe what has already happened and to predict what is going to happen. WPA is not a good predictor of future success, and it's not trying to be. What it measures is the value a certain player added to their team under the assumption that your team scoring runs is good. I would agree that it's much harder to predict future success based on statistics, but descriptive statistics measure what has already happened on the field, and in that way WPA or VORP or <Pick Your Favorite Sabermetric Acronym Here> is really, at its heart, no different than something like batting average, and is actually a lot more valuable.

Granted, but Pujols is always at least in the conversation, and Miguel Cabrera is playing out of his mind as well.

When your team has tanked as badly as the Cardinals in September, you don't get considered for MVP. The man just hit 100 RBI yesterday, and I can say with authority that Bernie Miklasz, Bryan Burwell and the rest of the homer writers at the STL Post Dispatch are not touting him for MVP consideration.

And so Wright should be considered despite the Mets' collapse?

It's too exhausting to argue with these guys anymore. If they don't like these stats, they don't have to look at them. Apparently they read/voted for this article, which is a strange way to show their "loathing", but whatever. Anyway, I'm not in the business of converting people anymore... life's too short and baseball's far too insignificant.

I'm just trying to be in the middle here. It seems like some people think stats are the be all and end all, and others think stats are meaningless. They're a great tool, but they're only some of the tools that can be used when assessing players.

I don't think he's gonna win, but hey, if the Rox make the playoffs, who knows? He certainly deserves consideration. Interesting though that Helton's got a higher WPA. Holliday's WPA is 4.18, just missing the list.

If Colorado gets in, how does Holliday not get it? He has a real argument even if they don't make it just because of how the Rockies have surged in the latter part of the season.

That is definitely true, and it's because a reliable and comprehensive quantification of the effects of fielding on winning does not exist yet. I will definitely grant that this is a big detriment to many statistical methods.

HA!!! I don't even have Carl Crawford as the 5th most valuable RAY this year - Pena, Upton, Young, Kazmir, Harris, Shields, THEN Crawford just ahead of Reyes and Iwamura.

Wins are a highly flawed measure of a pitcher's performance since they rely so much on offense -- Beckett led the Sox in wins last year -- anyone think he was their best pitcher? Actually, considering how the pitching imploded last season, he might have been.