It’s a great time to be a baseball fan. We just finished watching an exhilarating World Baseball Classic, which ended in a thrilling 3-2 Venezuela win over the United States, and we’re less than a week away from Opening Day. Part of the fun in the days leading up the start of the season is playing catchup with all the transactions that went down over the previous months. Sure, we all know that Kyle Tucker is a Dodger and Alex Bregman is a Cub, that Cody Bellinger returned to the Yankees and Pete Alonso joined the Orioles. We also don’t need to be told that Marcus Semien, Bo Bichette, and Luis Robert Jr. now play for the Mets, or that both Sonny Gray and Ranger Suarez slot in behind Garrett Crochet in the Red Sox rotation. But it can be hard to have a handle on how all these moves shape the outlook of teams across the league as we begin the season. The good news is that we at FanGraphs have been keeping tabs on everything throughout the offseason and spring training, so we’ve got you covered with everything you need to know about the coming year in baseball.
This week alone, we kicked off our annual Positional Power Rankings series, Dan Szymborski made his picks for the hitters who could boom and bust this season, and Ben Clemens looked into the importance of stars in the postseason. Michael Baumann analyzed the recent changes Walker Buehler has made as he looks to open the season in the Padres rotation, Ryan Blake examined the historically young White Sox catching tandem, and Brendan Gawlowski shared his latest notes from the Cactus League. Meanwhile, James Fegan ranked the top 30 prospects in the Astros system, and Eric Longenhagen reported on the experimental rule changes coming to the minor leagues this year. And if you haven’t read it yet, I encourage all of you to check out Davy Andrews’ excellent and revealing feature on the context of the recently installed Texas Ranger statue at Globe Life Field.
We won’t be talking about any of those topics in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll answer your questions about whether Aaron Judge might finish with more career WAR than Mike Trout, where Juan Gonzalez’s 1996 season ranks among undeserving MVP wins, and which national soccer team would be the best at baseball. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
__
Hello (Dan),
User Sandwiches4ever noted in a recent article comment that Judge and Trout are only eight months apart in age, but that Trout accumulated 40+ WAR before Judge even debuted. This is very interesting. Considering they are both entering their age-34 season, I am curious who is now projected to have higher career WAR, per ZiPS? Trout has about a 25-ish WAR lead right now — 87.2 compared to Judge’s 61.6 — but the three-year projections on their profiles get Judge within single digits of Trout by the end of the 2028 season. I’m curious, does ZiPS think he has the juice afterward to catch Trout, or does he fall just short? Does Trout get into Albert Pujols territory and give back a few wins at the end?
I’ll hang up and listen.
Thanks!
— David
Hey David, it’s funny how this question would have seemed preposterous five or so years ago, with Judge entering his age-29 season with 18.8 WAR, and coming off three years with injury-related interruptions. But amassing 42.8 WAR in five years has a way of readjusting expectations, especially because Trout has only put up 13.8 WAR over that same time period. It took Trout only a couple months into his second full season to collect that many wins!
ZiPS has a model that takes away playing time based on age and performance, and according to those projections, Trout is projected for a bit of negative WAR at the end of his career. That would mean he’d produce about 4.0 WAR the rest of the way. Except, like the Tigers and Miguel Cabrera, I don’t expect the Angels to seriously cut Trout’s playing time if he is healthy, even if he struggles. So I’ve instructed ZiPS to only reduce his playing time due to injury risk, not performance. With that alternative model, the projection comes out to… 4.0 WAR remaining. Thanks, coincidental math!
This would result in Trout finishing with 91.2 career WAR. No such adjustment is needed for Judge, as his median outcome doesn’t result in any playing time that would likely cause him to take a smaller role through the end of his contract in 2031. ZiPS projects Judge to add another 29.7 WAR to his ledger, putting him at 91.3 WAR for his career, a number so poetically close to Trout’s that I’m a little annoyed with ZiPS because it totally looks like I’m lying. The distributions aren’t quite identical, though, so ZiPS projects that Judge has a 47% chance of finishing his career with more WAR than Trout. Even though Judge has been mostly healthy during his monster five-season run, the final part of his contract does come with some injury risk. If I had to make my own prediction, I’d say Judge finishes with more career WAR than Trout.
__
Where does Juan Gonzalez’s 1996 AL MVP win rank among all-time undeserving MVPs?
Granted, no voter was looking at any variety of WAR in 1996, but he finished 31st in the AL in fWAR that year. Even if you just look at his counting stats, he didn’t lead the league in home runs or RBI. Hell, Albert Belle had more homers and RBI, and almost the same batting average. Ken Griffey Jr. hit 49 home runs and was still a very good defensive center fielder. Alex Rodriguez hit .358 with 36 homers and was an excellent shortstop. Mark McGwire hit 52 homers and slugged .730!
My only solace is that MVP voters will almost certainly never make a decision like that again.
— Stephen
Jay Jaffe: Few fields are as fertile for producing baseball arguments even decades after the fact as MVP awards. Everybody’s got a bone to pick with one year’s award or another, even if WAR has pointed toward a common consensus of measuring on-field value that has increased the frequency with which we’ve seen unanimous winners (six out of 10 from 2021–25). But before the advent of WAR, the concept of value was much more malleable. Since the time that the BBWAA took over the MVP voting in 1931, the organization’s instructions to voters have said that there’s “no clear-cut definition of what Most Valuable” means, and that voters should consider not only a player’s “actual value” in terms of “strength of offense and defense,” but also some more slippery concepts. From the BBWAA’s own site:
Notice that third point: Those instructions have invited more subjective considerations that recall the Hall of Fame ballot’s infamous character clause. With two writers per team per city voting, the electorate changes from year to year, and so there’s been far less consistency historically than we expect in the age of WAR-driven voting.
Quite often, voters rewarded the big RBI guy, even if he was merely benefiting from the on-base skills of his teammates in front of him, and didn’t distinguish himself by playing good defense or at least covering a difficult position. Sometimes voters have overestimated the value of another gaudy stat such as pitcher wins (on the rare occasion a pitcher does find his way into the MVP voting) or even saves. Recall that Dennis Eckersley rode his then-record 51 saves to the 1992 AL MVP award and the Cy Young. Frequently in the 20th century, and sometimes in the 21st, the results have been driven by narratives. After Kirk Gibson signed with the Dodgers as a free agent in January 1988, he developed a serious case of The Ass in spring training over a prank involving eyeblack, then helped the Dodgers end their epic playoff drought of [checks notes] two years, spurring them to a division title with 25 home runs and 76 RBI. While his one-legged October heroics — especially his pinch-homer against Eckersley in the World Series — were still to come, the idea that this former star of the 1984 Tigers had Showed His New Team How to Win carried the day, though to be fair, his 6.2 WAR was just 0.2 off the NL lead that year. On that note, it’s worth remembering that team success has tended to limit who gets consideration for the award.
As you alluded to in your question, most MVP votes took place long before voters could consult WAR. The stat’s entry into the discourse within the past decade and a half was not well received by the old guard. As I chronicled in my 2017 book The Cooperstown Casebook, the 2012 AL MVP race between Triple Crown winner Miguel Cabrera and 10-WAR rookie Mike Trout reduced award-winning writers and broadcasters to schoolyard bullies taunting nerds.
Still, determining “undeserving” isn’t necessarily easy even in such cases. Going by WAR, Trout had a sizable advantage over Cabrera, 10.1 to 7.3, but it’s not as though the latter had anything less than a great season. Cabrera did something unseen in either league in 45 years — did it while returning to a more difficult position (third base) so that the Tigers lineup could accommodate newly acquired first baseman Prince Fielder (5.0 WAR). The 88-win Tigers eked out an AL Central title by three games, while Trout’s 89-win Angels finished third in the AL West, four games out of a Wild Card spot. To these eyes, Trout deserved to win more than Cabrera, but Cabrera is hardly the most egregious winner.
Who might deserve that title? Even if we rule out significantly shortened seasons such as the 1981 and ’94 strike years and the 2020 pandemic season, that’s still 186 awards to consider dating back to 1931; it would take a book to pick all of those nits. But I think we can narrow the list down to a manageable number. For starters, let’s set aside the 21 awards won by pitchers not named Shohei Ohtani; there’s no consistency regarding hurlers being drawn into the discussion, and who knows how many years when they would have made better choices than the actual winners. If Roger Clemens won in 1986 by going 24-4 with a 2.48 ERA, 238 strikeouts, and 7.1 fWAR (8.8 bWAR), then why not Dwight Gooden (24-4, 1.53 ERA, 268 strikeouts, 8.9 fWAR, 12.2 bWAR) in the NL the year before? I’m not opening that can of worms today.
With pitchers and short-season guys set aside, here are the MVP awards won by players with less than 5.0 WAR in a full season of at least 144 games:
| Year | Lg | Name | Tm | AVG | OBP | SLG | HR | RBI | wRC+ | BsR | Off | Def | fWAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1979 | NL | Willie Stargell | PIT | .281 | .352 | .552 | 32 | 82 | 137 | -0.3 | 21.0 | -10.6 | 2.7 |
| 1996 | AL | Juan Gonzalez | TEX | .314 | .368 | .643 | 47 | 144 | 141 | 0.3 | 33.7 | -18.9 | 3.5 |
| 1987 | NL | Andre Dawson | CHC | .287 | .328 | .568 | 49 | 137 | 124 | 0.7 | 20.9 | -7.7 | 3.5 |
| 1979 | AL | Don Baylor | CAL | .296 | .371 | .530 | 36 | 139 | 142 | -0.2 | 36.6 | -25.6 | 3.6 |
| 1974 | AL | Jeff Burroughs | TEX | .301 | .397 | .504 | 25 | 118 | 158 | -0.6 | 40.8 | -29.4 | 3.7 |
| 2006 | AL | Justin Morneau | MIN | .321 | .375 | .559 | 34 | 130 | 138 | -3.9 | 28.4 | -12.3 | 3.8 |
| 1974 | NL | Steve Garvey | LAD | .312 | .342 | .469 | 21 | 111 | 130 | -0.4 | 23.2 | -9.6 | 3.8 |
| 1934 | AL | Mickey Cochrane | DET | .320 | .428 | .412 | 2 | 75 | 123 | -0.7 | 16.4 | 4.8 | 3.9 |
| 1931 | NL | Frankie Frisch | STL | .311 | .368 | .396 | 4 | 82 | 106 | 5.3 | 9.7 | 14.0 | 4.1 |
| 2002 | AL | Miguel Tejada | OAK | .308 | .354 | .508 | 34 | 131 | 129 | 3.6 | 29.5 | -8.8 | 4.5 |
| 1976 | AL | Thurman Munson | NYY | .302 | .337 | .432 | 17 | 105 | 126 | -1.5 | 16.6 | 4.6 | 4.6 |
| 1944 | NL | Marty Marion | STL | .267 | .324 | .362 | 6 | 63 | 92 | -0.2 | -5.4 | 32.9 | 4.6 |
| 1947 | AL | Joe DiMaggio | NYY | .315 | .391 | .522 | 20 | 97 | 150 | 0.1 | 36.7 | -8.9 | 4.8 |
| 1998 | AL | Juan Gonzalez | TEX | .318 | .366 | .630 | 45 | 157 | 145 | -0.1 | 38.8 | -11.3 | 4.9 |
That’s 14 seasons, with Gonzalez appearing twice, including the second-lowest mark. Note that just two of those seasons have happened since the turn of the millennium, and both predate the debut of WAR (but not Baseball Prospectus’ WARP, which first appeared in 2002 but caught on with a much smaller audience). In terms of agreeing with what the flavors of WAR tell us about players’ full contributions, voters have gotten better.
One could work up a full head of steam about most of the above winners. Returning to the subject of the Triple Crown, Cochrane, the catcher/manager of the 1934 AL pennant-winning Tigers, beat out Lou Gehrig, who not only led in homers (49) and RBI (166), but also all three slash stats (.363/.465/.706), wRC+ (193), and WAR (10.7). Gehrig finished just fifth in the voting, with Detroit’s Charlie Gehringer and Schoolboy Rowe in second and fourth, respectively, and Yankees teammate Lefty Gomez third! The Yankees finished seven games back, however, and so the Iron Horse was completely hosed. Ted Williams, who famously feuded with certain writers, lost out on MVP awards in both of his Triple Crown seasons, 1942 (Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon) and ’47 (DiMaggio above, by a single point). He led the AL in WAR both times, with Gordon a respectable second in 1942 (8.7 to Williams’ 11.5), but DiMaggio fourth in ’47, with less than half Williams’ 10.3.
Regarding the winners atop the table, I think the narratives overtook the facts. Here’s a closer look:
1979
The 39-year-old Stargell played in just 126 games due to chronic knee issues. He fell 22 plate appearances short of qualifying for the batting title but was very good when he played, fifth in the NL in homers and sixth in slugging percentage at a cutoff of 450 plate appearances, though he was nothing special defensively (-4 runs). For the only time in the award’s history, there was a tie in the voting, between Stargell and the Cardinals’ Keith Hernandez, who hit .344/.417/.513 (156 wRC+), won the NL batting title, and drove in 105 runs despite homering just 11 times. His 7.4 WAR ranked third in the league behind the Padres’ Dave Winfield (7.8, with 34 homers, a league-leading 118 RBI, and a 161 wRC+) and Mike Schmidt (7.5 WAR with 45 homers, 114 RBI, and a 156 wRC+). Any of those three would have been a superior choice to Stargell, though no doubt the gap between Schmidt’s .253 batting average and Hernandez’s league-leading mark hurt his chances. Schmidt would win in 1980, ’81, and ’86 with averages of .286 or higher to go with his home run and RBI leads.
Ultimately, the charismatic Stargell’s age, high-profile captaincy of the Pirates — this was the year he gained extra visibility for handing out embroidered gold stars that adorned the Pirates’ train-conductor caps — and the team’s NL East title drew voters to his cause. At nine years old, I was a sucker for it myself. His dual NLCS and World Series MVP awards that year do underscore what a special season he had.
Over in the AL, Baylor — who split his time between left field and designated hitter — benefited from his reputation for leadership as the Angels claimed their first AL West title with an 88-74 record. He was merely third among his teammates in WAR, though, behind Brian Downing and Bobby Grich, and 24th in the league; meanwhile, Gold Glove-winning Red Sox center fielder Fred Lynn won the slash-stat Triple Crown (.333/.423/.637, for a 175 wRC+) while hitting 39 homers and putting up a league-high 8.6 WAR. He finished just fourth in the voting on a team that came in third. So it goes.
1987
A 32-year-old Dawson hit free agency after a so-so 1986 season (20 HR, 2.4 WAR) for the Expos, whose home ballpark, Olympic Stadium, wrought havoc on his knees; he needed to play on natural grass. Unfortunately, he hit free agency at the height of the owners’ collusion, and didn’t get a single offer. After deciding the Cubs would be his best fit, under advice from agent Dick Moss, he handed the team a blank check; general manager Dallas Green wrote in a base salary of $500,000, less than half of what Dawson made the year before. The slugger nonetheless led the NL in homers and RBI, though given his low OBP, he ranked just 20th in WAR. Tony Gwynn won a batting title with a .370 average and led the NL with 7.4 WAR; Eric Davis hit 37 homers and stole 50 bases with 7.1 WAR, matching two-time MVP Dale Murphy and his 44-homer, 16-steal season, and Tim Raines, himself a victim of collusion, produced 6.7 WAR in 139 games. In the voting, however, all of them took a back seat to Dawson, as did the Cardinals’ Jack Clark (whose 176 wRC+ led the league) and glove whiz Ozzie Smith, who placed second and third for the NL East-winning Cardinals. Voters found Dawson’s plight so compelling that he became the first player to win the award while toiling for a last-place team.
1996
As for Gonzalez, he ranked second in slugging percentage and RBI and fifth in homers, but merely tied for 11th in wRC+ and 31st in WAR. A few things color that. For one, he did all that in just 134 games, missing 29 (the Rangers played one rain-shortened tie that year and replayed it in its entirety later that week), and so he finished with more RBI than games played, a comparatively rare feat. That said, Griffey also did it that year, with 140 RBI in 140 games. Gonzalez’s season was seen as a bounceback after injuries had limited him to 90 games in 1995, though that same line of thinking could apply to Griffey, who had played just 72 games the year before.
I think what really drove the results was that the Rangers had never reached the playoffs since being founded as the second Washington Senators franchise in 1961, and had gone a modest 74-70 in 1995 while being outscored. With their big slugger available and at the top of his game, they won the AL West. Belle starred for a Cleveland team that went 99-62 and finished first in the AL Central in 1996 while he hit .302/.410/.630 with 44 home runs and 130 RBI in 133 games. But Cleveland had just won the pennant the year before and he had a big season, too, so his 1996 campaign wasn’t a novelty. Griffey’s Mariners, a Cinderella story with a late-season comeback to claim their first playoff berth in 1995, slipped to 85-76 and missed the postseason. Even with what we now know was Griffey’s 9.7 WAR — and teammate Rodriguez’s 9.2 WAR, and Jim Thome’s 7.4 WAR for Cleveland, and McGwire’s 52 homers and 7.3 WAR for a 78-win Oakland team, and so on — those players’ accomplishments were discounted in the eyes of voters, either because their teams made the playoffs as expected or simply fell short. I should note that the vote itself was ridiculously close, with Gonzalez receiving 11 firsts and 290 points and Rodriguez getting 10 firsts and 287 points, followed by Belle (two firsts and 228 points) and Griffey (four firsts and 188 points). The result looks silly in retrospect, to say nothing of Gonzalez’s 1998 win and subsequent PED allegations.
Cochrane, DiMaggio, Stargell, Baylor, Dawson, Gonzalez — I think it’s fair to say all of those awards was less than fully deserved, at least as seen through the lens of WAR. The degree to which they were the most undeserved is in the eye of the beholder, and if I spent another few hours on this, I might not even include all of them in a top 10; we haven’t even explored Willie Mays pocketing just three MVPs while leading the NL in WAR 10 times from 1954–66, or George Bell winning the 1987 AL MVP over Wade Boggs and Alan Trammell. We could stay mad forever doing this!
__
Which national soccer team would be better at baseball? The soccer players have to play each other in a seven-game baseball series. France or Argentina? — Chase
Michael Baumann: There’s a boring answer to this one and a fun answer. I’ll go with the boring answer first: Baseball (like soccer, for what it’s worth) is a game that demands such specific perceptual and fine motor skills that it’s really difficult to come into it completely cold late in life. Even a sport with such facially similar physical actions as cricket is a tough transition in either direction.
So if you actually lined up all the international soccer teams and made them play baseball against each other, the best teams would be the ones from countries we just saw in the WBC: the U.S., Japan, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, maybe Australia — any big, relatively rich country where you’d expect an athletic young boy to have at least played Little League. Christian Pulisic probably isn’t great at baseball, but I bet he’s a lot better than Erling Haaland, just based on familiarity alone.
In fact, if you want to see what it looks like when a professional soccer player gets dropped into a baseball context cold, I actually wrote about it in 2024, when Crystal Palace, Wolves, and the Arsenal women’s team all stopped at MLB parks on their preseason tours of the U.S. It’s a real journey.
Anyway, that’s the boring answer.
The fun answer requires imagining a world where the best athletes in each country played baseball from birth. We Americans know this thought experiment well, because for decades we’ve been getting crushed in the round of 16 at the World Cup by countries with 5% of our population. And in a vain attempt to stanch the emotional bleeding, we go, “Sure, but LeBron James and Ed Reed aren’t soccer players so it doesn’t count.”
I’ll rephrase the question this way: Which country’s national soccer team would win a tournament if their players had been raised to play baseball from birth?
I assume that Chase mentioned France and Argentina in this answer because he thinks they’d do well in this context, and not because he was asking for the winner a specific France-Argentina series with the loyalty of David Trezeguet on the line. Both are fine answers; the two most recent World Cup champions and the two defending World Cup finalists remain near the top of the FIFA rankings. Both have an eye-watering combination of athleticism, skill, elite talent, and depth. Imagine Kylian Mbappé thinking “triple” right out of the box every time he makes contact.
In general, athleticism translates from sport to sport, but at the highest level, each sport requires specific physical attributes. I’ve always thought that the ideal soccer player and the ideal baseball position player would have quite a bit in common: agility, flexibility, reflexes, coordination. If you’re anywhere from 5-foot-6 to 6-foot-6, we can find someplace where your body works. Soccer players are a little leaner and baseball players have more upper-body strength, for obvious reasons, but I’m sure the best of both sports could alter their training regimen to gain or lose weight as required.
But while position players come in all shapes and sizes, pitchers tend to be big in ways that you don’t see often in soccer. Not only is there no such thing as a professional soccer player as big as the 260-pound Paul Skenes, I can’t think of very many who could support such a frame even if they ran less and lifted more.
The best national team with a lot of those guys comes from the Netherlands: Wout Weghorst and Virgil van Dijk are both 6-foot-5 with wide frames. Cody Gakpo is a lean, whippy 6-foot-4. Ryan Gravenberch is a solid 6-foot-3. These are pitcher builds. And there are still enough big, strong guys to fill out a lineup: Micky van de Ven is 6-foot-4 with wide receiver speed. The Timber brothers are built like corner outfielders. Then you can fill out the rest of the roster with the normal-sized guys: Memphis in center field; double play combination of Tijjani Rijnders and Noa Lang; Frenkie de Jong translating the brains-in-midfield role to catching.
I’ve talked myself into this. The Dutch did themselves a disservice by keeping up with this “soccer” nonsense and not committing their full resources to baseball.
* This article was originally published here
Comments
Post a Comment
Pitch Us Your Comments