2012 MLB Non Sox

Congratulations to David Price and R. A. Dickey on winning their Cy Young's!

Fat guys rule!

I mean, he won the triple crown and was the first position player to do so since Yaz in 1967. Cabrera's team also made the playoffs while Trout's did not. I'm as much of a stathead as anyone and I'm not very upset about Cabrera winning. I certainly don't think it was any sort of eff you to sabermetrics.

First off, tying team performance and player performance is silly. We all know that. But let's do it anyway!

Trout's team won more games in a much tougher division. And, the Angels went 8-15 in April while Trout was in the minors. Then he got called up and they played .591 ball the rest of the way. His team outplayed the Tigers in general, and they outplayed the Tigers by a lot when he was actually playing for the team.

The argument for Cabrera is "triple crown equals MVP, because shut up, that's why". That's it.

Look, you're preaching to the choir here. But we all know the old white men who vote on this thing aren't the most progressive baseball minds in the world. When offensive performance based on the simplest counting/rate stats are close, factors like making the playoffs and historical mumbo jumbo matter a lot for those guys. In ten years noone will be citing RBIs anymore, but it'll take time to get to that point.

It's actually much easier to argue that Adrian Beltre or Justin Verland had a better season than Cabrera than it is to argue that Cabrera had a better season than Trout. There's basically two reasons to vote Cabrera. Option one, you're just absolutely dead-set in the 1970 mindset of BA/RBI/HR being the be-all, end-all measure of a player and unwilling to even consider any arguments contrary to that. Or option two, it's a "stick it to the bloggers" vote; a desperate attempt by the old-line sportswriters to assert that they're still know best, they still have access to special information that no one else does; in short that they're still the authority on these matters.

(My next paragraph relates to the recent presidential election; please no political arguments, I only bring this up because it's an excellent example of old school/new school media conflict)

Just look at the hatred that rained down on Nate Silver from old-school political pundits leading up to the election. For instance, Peggy Noonan, who said that Nate Silver didn't know what he was talking about because she took a drive and she saw way more Romney lawn signs than Obama lawn signs (I s--- you not, she really made this argument). What this exposes is a mindset that simply having an important position at a major newspaper is what makes you an authority. It doesn't matter that her options are literally based on nothing more than gut feelings and silly concepts like "momentum", her opinions are valuable because she's a Very Important Person at a Very Important paper. 70 years ago when there were no other outlets, that was actually kind of true. Not that their status made them any more right about these matters, but readers simply didn't have a choice.

Then some uppity blogger like Nate Silver comes along and says no, your credibility isn't based on who you are or where you work or who you hobknob with at DC cocktail partys, it's based on your methodology and the actual measurable accuracy of your predictions. And it makes these people very mad to see their authority challenged-- especially when the person challenging it is so clearly right. And so you get a backlash, where people are actually willing to be totally wrong about fairly easy question just to assert that, no, really, they know something you don't know. My experience matters, my guy feelings matter, etc etc.

I know this is a long rant about something that ultimately doesn't really matter, but it really does bother me, because it's an insult to Mike Trout. It's an insult to the game of baseball in general that when a kid comes up and has the greatest rookie season in a generation (and really one of the great seasons ever, no qualifiers needed), and it goes unrecognized not because of anything the kid did, but because some old newpaper guys are butthurt that people on Twitter refuse to recognize that simply printing your opinion on some dead trees doesn't make it valid.

The sad part is, by digging in their heals on this, they're only hastening their own demise. And they're dragging the validity of the MVP award down with them.

Ron Burgundy: I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany

Sent from my SGH-T999 using proboards

I read several sentences of awful (grammar, logic, composition) in the Globe regarding the MVP vote before I realized the writer was Eric Wilbur. Serves me right for a) reading the Globe and b) not checking the author.

Better than the Gary Matthews Jr signing, anyway.

He doesn't need to be 2011-2012 good to be worth $8 million a year though. Given what Cody Ross is likely to make, Cabrera at that price is a very smart gamble.

The number of triples hit while wearing a certain colored underwear at least measures something that the player did himself, and is therefore a more useful statistic than runs batted in.

The whole thing is so ridiculously trollish and cliched it's hard to even get mad at it. The zingers are all so old they could vote. It reads more like an Onion parody of itself.