Defending the Baseball Writers

In 1965, Twins shortstop Zolio Versalles swatted 19 home runs, 45 doubles and 12 triples, swiped 27 of 32 bases, led the league in runs scored and total bases, whiffed just 27 times and earned a gold glove. The BBWAA rewarded him with an MVP award despite a putrid .319 on base percentage.

Was that, asked Andy from Maryland, the worst MVP season of all time? Absolutely not. In fact, not only was it a totally defensible award, it actually demonstrated that baseball writers can make a pretty savvy choice, even if by accident.

Because he batted .271 and walked only 41 times, Versalles' posted just a .319/.462 OBP/SLG line, giving him roughly the 16th highest OPS in the league. Add in the steals and the fielding acumen at the key infield position and it's easy to see that those numbers fail to capture his value.

To some degree, the writers stumbled onto a good choice. They were aided by a lack of high average sluggers in 1965, the kind who usually gobble MVP votes. Only two American Leaguers swatted as many as 30 home runs, with 32 leading the league. Those two players, Tony Conigliaro and Norm Cash, batted .269 and .266, and played corner outfield and first base respectively. In addition, that MVP lubricant, the run batted in, was in short supply in 1965; only two players knocked in even 100. Rocky Colavito, Cleveland's rocket-armed outfielder who led the league with 108, hit .287 and was a legitimate MVP contender. Detroit's slow-footed first baseman, Willie Horton, drove in 104 and batted .273. He came in eighth in the voting.

It didn't hurt Versalles that the Twins ran away with the pennant ahead of the White Sox and Orioles. It might explain why Tony Oliva finished second, although 98 RBI, 19 steals, fine defense and a .321 batting average didn't hurt. Also aiding Versalles was the Red Sox's miserable 100-loss season, which degraded Carl Yastzemski's MVP case in the eyes of the writers, despite a league-best .312/.395/.536 performance.

While you could make a case for Yaz, Colavito, Cash and Oliva, the player who might truly have been most valuable that year finished tied for 17th in the balloting. (See the balloting and player stats here.) Sudden Sam McDowell fanned 325 batters in 273 innings and limited the league to a 2.18 ERA. But McDowell won just 17 games, pitchers had their own award, and no Indians were scalping honors with a fifth place finish.

That left Versalles, a five-tool performer whose failing landed directly in that era's blind spot. 1965 was a full 14 years before Bill James first suggested that OBP was the bomb, and 20 years before anyone paid attention. Blaming sportswriters then for ignoring OBP would have been like blaming them for failing to post their stories on the Internet. In fact, given the run scoring environment that year, Versalles' balanced portfolio may very well have delivered the highest returns to his team.

Baseball writers today get no such pass, of course, because it's their refusal to learn anything since 1965 that makes their ignorance so galling. Today, it's lazy and intentional.

And before we get carried away with the back-patting, five of their NL counterparts deserved to have been drummed out of the corps for their spectacularly dreadful MVP castings.

In 1965, Willie Mays led the majors with 53 bombs and 128 runs scored, and batted a stellar.317/.398/.645. In the field he was ... Willie Mays. Across the California coast that same year, Sandy Koufax confounded NL batters to the tune of 26-8, 2.04 in 335 frames with an astonishing .885 WHIP and 382 strikeouts.

So what did five of the 20 writers do? They rewarded Maury Wills with their MVP votes for swiping 94 bases. Wills ran into outs 40 times, never hit the ball out of the park, and produced a flaccid .660 OPS. He didn't even get on base much: his .330 OBP was 68 points worse than Mays' OBP, and as a Dodger, he never had to face Koufax. (To be fair, batting against Juan Marichal was no picnic either.) Those five should have been stripped of their press passes and sent to do some real reporting in Saigon.

So raise a glass to the baseball writers of 1965 who tripped, faltered, stumbled, back-pedaled and crashed into a sophisticated AL MVP selection. Maybe that wisdom will make a comeback.
b