Everyone knows Major League Baseball is a game of statistics. If you watch a baseball game, the announcers spout off a random stat every 3.2 seconds. Things like “this guy hasn’t struck out against a left handed pitcher between the hours of 3pm and 4pm with two runners on base in the 4th inning since two years ago.” Who cares, right? By my calculations, 3.34% baseball fans care about the random stats announcers throw out during the game but 95.7% of unemployed baseball fans want the job of being the guy that finds those random stats to tell the announcers so they can tell everyone acting like they just know these things.
In keeping with the statistics theme of this post, I want to give some statistics surrounding the coveted MVP awards. As a little background, the MVP award stands for Most Valuable Player and is supposed to be given to the Most Valuable Player from the American League and the National League (all the teams are split into those two divisions). This year, Mike Trout (23 year old center fielder for the Angels) and Clayton Kershaw (26 year old starting pitcher for the Dodgers) took home the trophies. Why is this interesting? Let’s look at the stats:
1. There are 162 games in the MLB regular season (that’s a lot... a whole lot) which means there are approximately 1,458 innings played by each team in a season (could be more if the team went into extra innings and such)
2. Mike Trout (AL MVP) played in 157 games which is 96.9% of his team’s games and came up to bat 602 times which is an average of 3.8 times per game which is a little less than once every other inning.
3. Clayton Kershaw (NL MVP) played in 27 games which is 16.67% of his team’s games and he pitched 198.33 innings which is approximately 13.6% of total innings played by his team this season and only 7.3 innings per game (there are 9 innings in a game)
If something doesn’t seem to add up, that’s because it doesn’t. The award is called the “Most Valuable Player,” not the “Very Valuable Player” or the “Pretty Important Player.” How can someone appear in less than 17% of their team’s games and be the most valuable player on that team, much less the entire league? That doesn’t make a bit of sense. If the Dodgers won every game Kershaw pitched (which they didn’t), they would have a record of 27-135 unless some other valuable players stepped up to help win some of the games during which Kershaw didn’t pitch or the Dodgers would have the worst record in the history of baseball by a long shot. The runners up for the award in the National League this year were Giancarlo Stanton (played in 89.5% of games this season) and Andrew McCutchen (played in 90.1% of games this season). Those stats also make it much more impressive that Trout played in almost 97% of games.
In case you didn’t know, there exists an MVP specifically for pitchers; it’s called the Cy Young Award and it’s given to the best pitcher in each league. The sheer fact that there is such an award should be enough evidence that a pitcher should never win the MVP Award... ever. In 2011, Justin Verlander (pitcher for the Detroit Tigers) won the American League MVP and he played in 21% of games and pitched roughly 17.2% of innings in the season. It’s heinous and it must stop!
That's it for now...
No comments:
Post a Comment