I just don't understand how the Bellinger/Yelich and Bregman/Trout debates did not have the same result. It's the same argument for both. Stupid Athletic. I don't see how much more elite a defender Bellinger is than everyone else. Maybe I just don't watch enough LAD games.
Couple of thoughts. First, The Athletic has entirely too much pull in this vote. Second, Trout missed way too much of the season to be MVP. Had he played the whole season, no problem, give him the trophy. He missed way too much time though. That should have been taken into consideration, but it obviously wasn’t.
Was considering subscribing, now I'm glad I didn't. Had pretty much convinced myself that Bregman should have won the vote. Being healthy is a very important, and evidently underrated skill. Although baseball is definitely a team sport, any single batter affects the overall lineup and helps dictate what pitches other batters will see, so it's not completely in a vacuum.
There is a threshold and Trout was passed it. Writers I have spokent to use the 75-80% rule when voting for these awards. Trout played in 83% of the games last season. He is unanimously the best player in baseball and deserves it every year unless someone has a phenomenal Mookie betts 2018 type season.
Yordan Alvarez can become MVP next year, the baseballs were juiced this year. Yordan Alvarez, Aaron Judge, Alex Bregman, Mike Trout, Shohei Otani (Pitch and Hit)
Maybe, but you can define value in a lot of different ways and given the different nature of different sports it's reasonable the results don't look the same. By most metrics, Trout contributed to more wins than Bregman and that's a lot of how "value" is currently defined in MLB. Team wins is not how most people define value for an individual position player. A guy like Jeter would have probably won an MVP if it was. If you want to define value more like a business would, then you could include players salary's. Bregman would have a much stronger case against Trout if you looked at production compared to salary. Most writers don't penalize players for getting paid though.
He is perceived as helping his team win more games even though the rest of team makes the team total low. It it the most valuable player, not the best player with the most valuable teammates. It could have gone either way. I suspect Trout won because he's lost more than once when he should have won.
The AL ROY wasn’t really much of a contest. MVP was close. Close enough that, in my opinion, missing roughly a fifth of the season should have mattered. Bregman played 22 more games on a first place team. I do like the comparison though. Interesting thought.
I also think playing for not only a non-contender but a 90-loss team means you're straight up not playing in the same echelon of baseball as the top team in the majors. Trout's going to be respected by anybody with a brain, but teams are just not going to take him or anyone on his team as seriously as they take the team everyone's trying to dethrone. All his IBBs just mean teams don't have to pitch to him because he has no protection in the lineup. I also think Bregman's substantially lower strikeouts should have really stood out. That and playing half the infield. There's no doubt Bregman struggled more early in the season, at least in hitting for average, but I think that's canceled out by playing 20% more games on the top team and keeping said team propped up during the Great Astros Infield Plague of 2019. Also, there 425 voters for the BBHoF, but only 30 for the yearly MVP, and 7/30 = 23% of them work for one outfit? What?
Lorcan M. Hi Ken, thanks for the insight! Do you think you would have placed Bregman differently if the sign stealing news had broken before voting took place? Charles H. Dumbasses already thinking sign stealing is like taking steroids.
