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There will never again be an MVP vote quite like the AL in 1979. That much we know for sure. Here's what I mean: If the 1979 MVP race were voted on today, Fred Lynn would win 100 out of 100 times. Lynn led the American League in hitting...
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Nicely done. Funny thing is that you could have done the same thing with the 1979 AL Cy Young race. Mike Flanagan won it because he, too, fit the narrative of the Orioles finally winning again, and had THE critical stat for pitchers in 1979 in his favor; He led the league in Wins.
I’m a little confused. Yesterday you talked about Fred Lynn as a player who was made for Fenway Park (a player about whom Bill James said ““In the long run he was a .285 hitter in Anaheim with 18-24 home runs a year.”)
In this advanced stat era, shouldn’t Bobby Grich’s numbers (in Anaheim, no less) as a second baseman make his case for MVP stronger than Lynn’s?
WAR takes into account the park factor. It was not even close between Lynn and Grich. Both of them were pretty consistent that Lynn (2.9 and 3 WAR, BF & F respectively) was the better player. Even if you do not think park factor was strong enough or the fielding stats were wrong, it is hard to make up 3 WAR. Brett is a different story. Both sites have Lynn with just a 0.3 lead which could just be noise. Either of the two of them would have been a fine choice.
Does park factor take into account the difference between left and right-handed hitters? From the cursory research I did yesterday, it does not appear that park factor digs that deep. Overall, I believe fenway is somewhat neutral; however, for a right-handed hitter, it is insane.
As a kid, I gave my baseball soul to Fred Lynn, so of course I’d award him the MVP. But taking a step back… Mr Best or Mr Impact? The choice is easy: both! Why not two awards? The best player deserves the recognition, but a computer could FedEx the trophy once it’s determined that the other players have been mathematically eliminated. Where’s the fun in that? But baseball, at least for me, is about the beautiful stories, and crowning a Mr Impact is both fun and helps us recall those players that once made the baseball world buzz, at least for one season.
We go through this every year. “Valuable” and “best” are two different things. If it was the MOP (Most Outstanding Player) that would mean whoever has the best season wins the award (at this point, that’s usually Mike Trout). As Christoper says, FedEx him the trophy around September 1.
Valuable is a little more nuanced. If you have a great season on an otherwise lousy team does that mean you are the most valuable? Probably not, or at least that your value is being wasted. If Whit Merrifield has a 9 WAR season on an otherwise forgettable 95 loss Royals team, does that make him the MVP if Jose Altuve is at 8 WAR, but the Astros win the division with 100 wins? Yes, you can win MVP and not be on a playoff team, but that is a tougher assignment.
Right, just ask Andre Dawson.
Thing is, Ken, even accounting for the Fenway effect, Lynn was measurably the best player in the AL that year, if only by a little. His 8.6 fWAR led all position players by a modest margin over Brett (8.3). Grich had only 5.6. bWAR works out about the same. No pitcher was worth more than about 7 WAR that year, so it probably should have been Lynn.
I do want to argue (since Joe says he likes that 😉 ) about Brett, though. “…a relatively new story”??? Hardly. Sure, Lynn had won the RoY and MVP in 1975, but Brett had debuted two years earlier, was a starter in 1974 (finishing 3rd in the AL RoY) and by the end of 1979 he had led the league in doubles, total bases, & batting average once each, in At-Bats twice and in hits and triples three times apiece! He’d been a four-time All-Star! He’d gotten MVP votes four-years running prior to ’79, including a strong second-place finish in 1977. He was the farthest thing from a new story, despite driving in 100 runs for the first time. He was already a star.
I think, as you suggest, the main reason he got more MVP love than Lynn is that his team finished 3 games out of first in the AL West, contending down to the last week of the season, and Brett hit well (.313, 6HR, 20RBI in September) down the stretch. Lynn’s team hadn’t been that close to 1st place since mid-July, and he hit .263 in September while the team faded. That’s the kind of narrative the sportswriters seem to love.
Jinx, you said it better though.
I agree and I think Joe knows this too. On Brett you could add he hit a game tying 3 run HR in Yankee Stadium in Game 5 of the 1976 ALCS (only to be erased by Chambliss) and 3 HRs in an ALCS playoff game (in Yankee Stadium no less) in 1978. I think he was pretty famous.
I don’t think WAR is properly accounting for the park issue. Fred Lynn’s away numbers are not especially better than Grich’s away numbers (Grich’s are slightly lower than his home numbers overall).
Grich away numbers: .281/.346/.521 with 15 home runs
Lynn away numbers: .276/.371/.461 with 11 home runs.
Lynn was a center fielder while grich was a 2nd baseman…If the park is properly being taken into account, shouldn’t Grich, as a 2nd baseman have a better war score?
It may be true that park factors aren’t properly weighted in WAR, but it’s also not appropriate to look at only road numbers, for at least a couple of reasons. First, players on different teams have different road environments. For instance, everyone in the NL except Rockies players gets to hit in Coors Field on the road, so they will have somewhat easier road hitting environments than Rockies players will have. Also, schedules aren’t balanced, as teams play against their own division more than others. Second, there is some skill involved in learning to take advantage of features of your home park. Joe’s example, Fred Lynn, openly admitted that he decided to go to the opposite field more when he saw how close the left field wall is in Fenway Park. Wade Boggs has said the same thing. There is skill involved in being able to do something like that effectively, so players who manage to do so particularly well shouldn’t have the entirety of their good home field performance ignored.
W’re talking about 1979 here. In the American league, teams played against divisional foes 13x per year and against teams from the other division 12 x. That’s about as small of a difference as there could be.
And it’s not the same year, but I note that Lynn’s numbers drastically dropped as soon as he moved to Anaheim…
…Which speaks to how well he tailored his swing to Fenway Park, as he stated. Again, that’s a skill not everyone has.
Their road numbers were similar, yes, with Grich getting a slight edge, for whatever that’s worth. Lynn had a higher OBP, which may be more valuable than the extra hundred points of SLG, or at least a wash maybe.
Grich also hit .307/.384/.554 with 15 doubles, 15 HR and 54 RBIs at home, which is great.
Lynn hit .386/.470/.798 with 30 doubles, 28 HR, and 83 RBI at Fenway that year, which is insane!
You can say Lynn was not as good as his overall numbers made out because his park was an easier place to hit than most…but you can’t just discount like half of his home production because of it! That’s what you’d have to do just to get him even with Grich.
Defense/positional adjustments do not help your case either, since (per baseball reference) Lynn was worth 1.0 dWAR compared to Grich at 0.6 dWAR. BB-ref uses similar positional adjustments for offense for 2B and CF (+3 vs. +2.5, respectively) so that’s also a wash. (Fangraphs tells a similar story, with Lynn worth 7.2 Runs on defense, compared to Grich at 3.6.)
There is really no way to say Grich was a better or more valuable player than Lynn in 1979 unless you believe that Fenway Park itself deserves credit for 15 doubles and 14 homers, plus all the runs and RBIs that went with them. That seems a stretch to me.
Joe,
How could you forget about Darrell Porter in that year? Should have come in at least 3rd. Had better OBP with more RBIs than Brett with much better glasses and catching.
“I’d rather they miss a dozen “too close to tell even on replay” calls than have one baserunner called out because once you slow it down to absurdity you can see that his shoe bounced a millimeter off the bag while the fielder kept on the tag. ”
Count me in on that one. The first time I saw that happen I was livid. There wasn’t enough space between the shoe and bag for a mosquito to fly through, and it was there for less than a tenth of a second. Anyone who has ever slid into a bag knows that when you hit it, there is a tiny bounce, invisible to the naked eye. (If there is not, you have literally slid INTO the bag, and may have injured your ankle.) To call a player out on that minuscule bounce is just crazy.
Couldn’t agree more. It irks me every time I see a runner called out on that little bounce. If avoiding those plays means scrapping replay entirely, then I vote for the immediate abolition of replay.
Fred Lynn looked the part in CF, making driving catches, etc., but he actually wasn’t very fast and didn’t get to the balls a CF should have. He was given several GGs that really should have gone to Chet Lemmon, actually got to those balls.
Lynn’s 1.0 dWAR in 1979 mystifies me and I think it was helped by having a great defensive SS in Rick Burelson taking his cutoffs. Lynn never came close to that level of dWAR the rest of his career.
Of course following Joe’s logic, maybe Freddie should just be thankful he finished 4th instead of 5th, since his teammate who finished fifth had 8 more RBIs than him. 🙂
There will never again be an MVP vote quite like the AL in 1979. That much we know for sure.
I’m not sure that history moves only in one direction and we don’t need to go as far back as 1979 to see the same dynamic.
How about 2006 in the NL when Ryan Howard (5.2 bWAR) was the “story” while Pujols (8.5), Beltran (8.2), Utley (7.3), and more than a half dozen other players were better. Or the same year in the AL when Justin Morneau’s 4.3 bWAR was third on his own team (Mauer @ 5.8 and Santana @ 7.6) plus also trailed Jeter, Ortiz, Dye, Hafner, Guillen, Sizemore, Ichiro!, Wells, and several more.
Or even more recently, Cabrera’s first MVP when he won the triple crown was a “story” but his 7.1 bWAR trailed his own teammate Justin Verlander’s 8.0 as well as Trout (10.5), Beltre (7.2 – certainly within margin of error of the stat though), and Cano (8.4). The next year, Cabrera was less of a story, but still, at 7.3 bWAR was clearly behind Trout (9.0) and behind, but within margin of error, of Donaldson (7.7) and Cano (7.8).
We all have a tendency to think that history has stopped right here and right now. It hasn’t. We also have a tendency to think that today is markedly different than yesterday. It isn’t.
So it used to be like the Heisman.
Replay should only be done at full speed. (in both baseball and football) Baseball really missed the boat when the put in their replay. They had the chance to start fresh and avoid all the negative things about the NFL’s replay but they didn’t. They should have just put an extra ump in each crew (which would have been a win for the umpires who didn’t really want review anyway) who would watch the game from the booth and signal down to the field when there was an obvious error and that’s it. Sometimes simple is better.
WAR does not even come close to accounting for the ‘Fenway effect’. Lynn hit just .276 .371 .461 on the road in 1979, and .386 .470 .798 at home.