Halftime Hardware

All-Star Break means taking stock, so let's examine the season at mid-life and pick the winners, losers and kncukleheads.

It's been a sub-par half-year for the best player in baseball. Albert Pujols' .416 OBP would be his worst since 2005, his .992 OPS would be the second worst of his career and his .332 "True Average," a catch-all seamhead measure adjusted to look like a batting average that purports to encompass total offensive value including baserunning and considering ballpark and pitching faced, would be the worst since his second season. Consequently, Price Albert is merely an MVP contender. Were he tearing it up as usual, he'd have lapped the field. 

It's hard to argue with Ubaldo Jimenez as the MVP of the Spring and early Summer in the NL. The Rockies are winning 89% of his starts and 48% of their other games. Luck and good defensive support play may be on his dance card every start, but Jimenez is pitching for the same team as his mound mates. His contribution to that gap -- no matter how incomplete -- sounds award-worthy. For what it's worth, sabermetric measures suggest Jimenez has been a little less effective than Roy Halladay & Josh Johnson.

If you're like me, you prefer to weigh your apples and oranges separately. That would leave Ubaldo to the Cy Young competition and pit Pujols against Joey Votto, David Wright, et. al. That particular trio ranks 1-2-3 in value over replacement player, which considers position, but not defense. They are close enough in VORP to justify elevating Wright's excellent defense at third over Pujols' superb glovework on the corner and leaving Votto behind.

The picture is more muddled in the Junior Circuit. Outfielder Josh Hamilton (.346/.390/.625, 47.2 VORP), first baseters Miguel Cabrera (.346/.423/.651, 46.8 VORP) and Justin Morneau (.345/.437/.618, 45.5 VORP), and keystoner Robby Cano (.336/.389/.566, 42.5 VORP) are the main options.  Cabrera is clearly the best hitter, but contributes the least with the leather. Cano is plainly swings the least lethal bat, but is most valuable facing the hitter. No one would have to justify a vote for Morneau or Hamilton either. It's worth accounting for offense-inflating ballparks in NY and Dallas, and recognizing that pitchers sing God Bless Comerica. What seems most likely, anyway, is that Cabrera maintains a stratospheric batting average while Hamilton suffers from mean-regression, making the choice a bit less Solomonic.

On to Cy Young. The above-referenced Jimenez  is an obvious NL choice, though Johnson (1.70 ERA, 4.39K/BB), Halladay (2.19 ERA, 6.74 K/BB) and Adam Wainwright (2.11 ERA, 3.63 K/BB) could proudly hoist the trophy -- if there is one -- guilt free. Halladay offers more endurance and that level of accomplishment in a home stadium that plays to the grand slam crowd, though it must be nice never to have to face his mates Chase, Ryan, Jayson, Shane, Jimmy, et. al. Johnson pitches in front of an infield anchored -- and I do mean anchored -- by Hanley Ramirez and Dan Uggla. So pick your poison, or just wait for the rest of the season to play out.

Again in the AL, the view is more opaque. Cliff Lee (2.54 ERA, 15.17 K/BB, 10 of 13 Quality Starts) would be my history-making choice; he'd have to earn the award with one team in the first half and another post-ASB. Jon Lester (2.78 ERA, 2.82 K/BB, 13 of 18 with Fenway as home base), Felix Hernandez (2.88 ERA, 3.12 K/BB, 16 of 19) and others jostle for position at the front of the line.

Armando Gallaraga and Jim Leyland share the Gentleman Merit Badge for proving that you can have a perfect game even if you give up a hit. In the same vein, Jim Joyce wins the Don Zimmer Real Man Apology Award. Adrian Gonzalez earns the Snow White Trophy for playing with seven dwarfs in San Diego. The LeBron James Ribbon goes to the Cleveland Indians, who have saddened the people of Northeast Ohio by staying. The late George Steinbrenner takes the Warren Buffet plaque to eternity for plunking down $187,000 of his own schwag in an $8.7 mil play in 1974 for the Yankees, now worth $1.5 billion.

And then there's the the Idiot Award shared by all of us. Or at least all of us who thought the Reds were also-rans, the Padres were cellar-dwellers, the Mets were done, the Phillies were shoo-ins and the Mariners were contenders. And we'll earn it all over again unless we acknowledge that we might be right when it's all said and done. So let's just play the second half.

 I can't wait until Thursday.
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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.
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