BBWAA awards 2017

'most player award'

i'm not going to make another bartolo colon joke, don't worry

James has been reversing his opinion on "clutch hitting" and the like for some time ... we were discussing it on at least one other thread some time ago.

Here's another way to look at it -- in this year's World Series, George Springer was the MVP and the Astros best player and there's not really any disagreement about that. But in 2018, would you bet on him being the Astros' best player? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that in the actual, completed games of the World Series, he was easily the Astros' best player. They're two different things.

James is saying that you can apply the same logic to an entire season. In a short series, nobody has any trouble giving the MVP to the guy who isn't necessarily the "best" player, and it's easier to connect a player's contributions to his role in helping to win the games. There's an assumption that we can't apply his logic to an entire season because the luck will average out when the sample size isn't small, but that's not always true! Players have flukey great seasons all the time, for example, because of a high BABIP that never levels out, even though it should, probabilistically speaking.

http://m.cubs.mlb.com/news/article/262070398/why-kris-bryant-got-first-place-mvp-vote

the single 10th-place vote for Gary Sanchez gave me a chuckle

every single hall-eligible nba mvp has been inducted, and only three hall-eligible nhl mvps were not

Not really a hockey fan, but I found the comparison interesting, so I took a look at all the NHL MVPs.

Similar to the NBA--only two eligible winners not in the HOF, both one-time winners. I take it one of them is somewhat infamous: Al Rollins, a goalie who won 12 games and lost 47 in '53-54 but won the MVP. So I've discovered that sabermetrics was actually invented by a bunch of hockey writers who were paying no attention to a goalie's W-L record 60 years ago.

I don't know if the gap between non-Hall baseball MVPs and their NBA/NHL counterparts has more to do with a) baseball being more of an individual game, or b) baseball being more prone to the fluke (or at least anomalous) season.

Also, Trout has risen to 15th on the MVP-share list (4.43), moving ahead of Berra and Foxx.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/mvp_cya.shtml

Bonds would seem to be untouchable: not sure that even Trout has almost 5 full shares ahead of him. But he seems like a very good bet for second by the time he finishes.

it seems very odd to advocate applying a blanket team-specific Win adjustment (actual vs projected) which could punish/reward all the players on the team based on nothing but bad or good luck. for example, let's say a team is projected to win 100 games based off of their pythagorean record. but in each of the last three games of the season, the bullpen blows a 4-run lead and they end up only winning 97 games. so now, according to bill james, we should apply a -3% win contribution adjustment to each of the individual player's WAR because they "actually" only won 97 instead of 100?

I don't think he was doing that. I think he was positing the 6.8 WAR as being as potentially plausible as the 8.1 WAR.

Clutch hitting was a big part of why I thought Votto should have won the MVP this year

there are flukes in hockey, but not enough to win mvp. rob brown scoring 49 goals with an incredible 29% shooting percentage in 1989 comes to mind -- but he did that because he was on lemieux's line. and lemieux himself went 85-114-199. the great ones can give average/mediocre players a huge boost, but the latter will never overtake them

pitching and goaltending seem to be more prone to flukes. feel for the slider comes and goes, i guess

More evidence of the changing mindset of voters: this year's NL CY Young was only the second time a pitcher who led his league in both wins and ERA did not win (and the other time it went to Willie Hernandez during the we-love-closers era, so in a sense 2017 was the first time):

http://www.billjamesonline.com/2017_nl_cy_young_award/

Marks attributes the key to being IP; if Kershaw had won he would have also set a precedent, the lowest IP for a non-closer, non-strike-year winner ever. He also suggests H/9, but I don't know how much attention voters pay to that these days; I'd say the strikeouts were much more important (Marks mentions those too). There's a little bit on Scherzer and the HOF at the end, where he says pretty much what most of us have been saying here.

Posnanski's response to James's piece:

http://joeposnanski.com/more-on-war/

(I believe they're friends, and Posnanski always writes favorably about James.)

Doddering old guy makes the case for Charlie Blackmon (and, by implication, Arenado):

http://www.billjamesonline.com/mvp_followup/

cameron: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/putting-war-in-context-a-response-to-bill-james

I hardly think the consideration of Pythagorean win-loss in James' article was being suggested as a "simple proposed fix." It was just illustrating a point.

Players have flukey great seasons all the time, for example, because of a high BABIP that never levels out, even though it should, probabilistically speaking.

Are we also allowing for the possibility that a high BABIP over the course of a season is not always flukey, though, in the way that Joey Votto's high lifetime BABIP is presumably not flukey? (I know this post was from three days ago...)