Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 979: Mike Trout and the Post-MVP Era

Episode Date: November 18, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Kyle Gaedele, then share their thoughts on Mike Trout’s second MVP Award and what it does and doesn’t say about both Trout and the BBWAA.

Hello and welcome to episode 979 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. My name is Ben Lindberg, writer for The Ringer, joined, as always, by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hey. So I figured we could do a little MVP talk since we both wrote about it. Anything else you want to talk about? Yeah, I meant to bring this up when we were talking about Eddie Goodell the other day,

but you probably know his grand-nephew, his great nephew i'm not sure which which it is yeah uh was uh drafted last year uh in 2015 by the san diego padres and is like a you know is a genuine baseball star you know uh and i'm where was he drafted what round i mean sixth round uh-huh he had previously been drafted at a high school by the rays much lower and didn't sign and uh i don't know i said last year it wasn't last year what it actually was was last year he was released so his his minor league career ended uh last year he uh made it to double a He's currently playing in indie ball and has a good line, had a good line last year, but not that interesting. 308, 399, 517 in the Frontier League, 24 steals in 26 attempts.

So I'm trying to figure out whether this is an astounding coincidence that he would have a great nephew who was also one of the 2000 or so greatest baseball players in history or alive, I should say. Or whether given normal rates of procreation, whether one should expect to have a drafted baseball player in your family within three generations. Well, you did that article once on former major leaguers. Yeah, right. Eddie Goodell, right? Yeah, exactly. I don't think that Eddie Goodell's name carries much weight in draft rooms, though.

No, maybe not. I don't even know how Eddie Goodell was picked, but did his athleticism play a role in why he was picked as opposed to someone else? I don't think so. I literally just read about this three days ago, and I've already forgotten most of it. But he was an actor, and I believe that he was picked because he was like, he probably had, he probably had something like an agent or something. He was the,

let's see, he was the promotional mascot for Mercury records. So he was famous little person. Okay. I guess at the time. And so the, anyway, yeah.

All right. You're not going to answer whether this is an astounding coincidence or simple math? I think probably, I would say it's probably unlikely, but it can't be dramatically unlikely. Well, so let's say that he had three or four siblings and married a woman who also had three or four siblings, then that would mean that you have seven-ish lines of descendants to produce a draftable player. And great nephews. So that would mean two generations, probably. Two?

Maybe 55. Yeah. So two generations later. So if everybody was having say three kids, then you'd be at what you'd be at. Not that many. You'd only be at like 63 children in the third generation. So you only have like a hundred people to choose from. It doesn't seem doable. Well the odds though if out of the yeah so what percentage of people are drafted let's say like one in a thousand american males get drafted maybe now sixth round is pretty high so there are two million roughly 2 million American males are born every year. And, you know, 1,200 are drafted. If you remove the duplicates, then you have, what is that, 1 in 2,000?

2,000 times 1,000 is 2 million. So you have a 1 in 2,000 chance of being drafted if you're born in this country. So clearly he doesn't have 2,000 descendants But 50 is kind of a lot It's maybe not enough to call it an astounding coincidence, I guess Yeah, well, I guess so It's definitely unlikely I mean, you wouldn't bet on it But it's probably not a crazy coincidence

Okay, all right Okay, anything else? Anything other than that? I know it's hard to follow that bit of banter. No. Okay. All right. So award voting. We talk about Tr, most people's surprise. Probably not everyone's surprise. But I don't know. What probability would you have given him winning, do you think?

Slim. One in a quarter, maybe. Maybe even less. Honestly, I'm not sure. This kind of is like the second to last paragraph of what I wrote. So maybe I'm jumping too far ahead. But I don't think if you pick a random group of 30 bbwa members and redo the vote he like he likely wins i think that yeah he kind

of just got lucky by who got pulled out of the hat my yeah i i kind of agree i i mean i looked at the list of voters and it wasn't like you know half of them were from fan graphs and baseball perspectives or anything. They were mostly veteran writers, but of course, many veteran writers supported him before. So yeah, I mean, if it's an organization of several hundred people and you're pulling out a small single-digit percentage of those people to make the award choice on behalf of the group, essentially, which is kind of weird, by the way. Like, I never really realized until now just how potentially unrepresentative of the whole body it is. Like, why not have everyone vote? Like, Hall of Fame, once you get to a certain point. Why not have everyone vote? Then everyone could write an MVP vote column. You could have 600 of them.

Why not have everyone vote? That's a great question, Ben. Why not have everyone vote? In the MVP award, that's like one of the biggest public-facing things the BBWA does. Why put it in the hands of... You know, I would guess that the reason is that when it started, it was a very small group, like when it was the Chalmers Award, and then when the league gave it out, and when, you know, first there was only an AL MVP, and then there was an NL MVP, and then it went away for, I think, two years, then it came back. And throughout that time,

it was always a very small voter pool, not because there was a sample of a larger group, but just because there were, it was a small voter pool. There were, I think it was always two per city. And for most of that time, it was, you know, the same pool of voters who were representing each city. And so you, I would guess that they did then vote for all the categories, but it was still only like 16 votes. And my guess is that rather than carry forward the tradition of everybody votes for everything, they decided to carry forward the tradition of there's only two per city. It's a strange thing, though, because, you know, like the entire BBWAA has to wear whatever decision those 30 people make, essentially. So if those 30 people make an unpopular decision, then the whole organization gets tarnished by that.

And now 30 people make what a lot of people think is a smart decision. And now the entire group looks better and smarter because of that. But it's pretty strange. I mean, I've always been aware, obviously, of the fact that not everyone votes. But until today, I never really thought of how weird that is. Why would you put this very famous thing that your organization does? I mean, it's on TV now. It's a whole thing, the finalists and

the final vote and the airing it on certain times and setting up conference calls. I mean, it's a whole production. Why leave that in the hands of 30 randomly selected members? It really does put a lot of pressure on individual voters too. Yeah. You can absolutely, I mean, not not every year not every award but there have been awards that have been lost because one person had a contrary but still reasonable position or sometimes a contrary and unreasonable position this year with the cy young voting and two guys getting singled out for their ballots yeah exactly and i i don't think that there's anything

scandalous about not having Justin Verlander on your top five. I mean, we talked about how there's so little, like you could stare at this AL pitchers forever and not come to any real conclusions about who was best. And if you look at the people who were on their ballots instead of Verlander, that seems totally reasonable. And I don't think that there was anything unusual about those ballots at all. And yet the pressure

on those ballots now is like astounding. You know, like people are, I bet you anything that they got death threats on Twitter because. Well, who doesn't? Right, exactly. And, but I mean, like that still sucks. Like that's a lousy feeling. It really sucks being insulted by strangers on the internet. And if there were 500 voters, probably they wouldn't have gotten the same level of insult. And that's sort of weird. But yeah, for that reason, and also for other reasons, I don't know that this is any sort of watershed moment in how the BBWA votes. I think, A, it was fairly close. You know, Trout won pretty handily in first place votes, but the total wasn't dramatically different. And also, I don't know whether there was any vote splitting going on because Ortiz finished sixth, and so Betts had a teammate who was also a high-ranking finisher. And I don't know, maybe it was just the fact that it was Betts and he hasn't been around that long maybe some people were slow to appreciate him or or maybe so to appreciate him just because he has one of those skill sets that makes players underappreciated sometimes and and that kind of hurt Trout against Cabrera perhaps so I think

yeah for all those reasons I don't think you can really say that this is new that in one year You can really say that this is new that in one year, especially because one day earlier, we were talking about how the BBWA was never going to give up pitcher wins. And Rick Porcello was winning the award because he was 22 and four. And then the next day we're talking about voters are so enlightened now. So that was what I led with in my piece, which I don't know if you read it. But in 2010, we acted like the Felix Hernandez victory was like this mandate that it was some like representation of the BBWA doing something, but it wasn't. It was a sample of 30 that happened to get the 30 people who collectively picked Felix Hernandez. is and every Cy Young winner since then has been in the AL at least has been the guy with the most wins so we probably yeah don't take into consideration enough that this is it's very easy to just have a sort of sampling error that leads the result which is fine I think it's good

I'm fairly trout winning almost made me more nihilistic about the whole thing. Me too. Yeah. That's kind of what I wrote. Really? Yeah. I got a readers now. Trout kind of, I think it's still in editing.

I don't know. But Trout. Winds up. So you plagiarize me. Well, basically my takeaway was that Trout won an award that he had already devalued himself. Yes. Like over the past couple of years, we all sort of just swore off the MVP award because Trout didn't win. And that was the clearest evidence that this was not really something we needed to care about all that much. I mean, when we all got up in arms about it, when he was going

up against Cabrera, and then when the voters made the decision they did, a lot of us thought, well, okay, then this is not an award that reflects the way I value baseball players. It's, I don't know what it is. I don't know whether they're looking at different stats or whether they are defining value differently or whatever it is. It doesn't change how good Mike Trout is. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball. I don't care if 30 BBWA voters agreed with that or not. And so it's hard to go from that to then celebrating Trout winning that same award because we had already like divorced Trout's value from the MVP award. So I have been looking for the right avenue or the right space to share this

observation in. I guess it'll be here. You know, Donald Trump spent the months leading up to the election talking about how the election is rigged and how the results are not going to be valid and how the bankers control everything. And yet the day after, how come Trump supporters weren't like, huh, I wonder why the Rothschilds picked Trump. That's odd. I guess I don't like Trump. It's either, you know, it's either invalid or it's valid. Yeah. And I also, so I didn't, I didn't read, I have to say I did not read this piece.

I saw the headline. I mean to circle back to it. It came out earlier in the day when we thought that Trump, that Trout was going to lose. I heard Trump like five times in that piece. I had to do a control F at the end to make sure I hadn't left any trumps instead of trouts. But it was Dave, I think it was Dave Cameron talking about how the integrity of the award, the credibility of the award, it was, I assume from the headline, how the credibility of the award was at stake. And I almost feel like it's, in a sense, it's the opposite that the i i almost wish that the voting would lean into this

not really the best player interpretation of mvp because it has become like we don't know what the award is anymore and it has become the closest that well it has always probably been the closest thing we have to a best player award and i think that over the years i mean i went back you asked why i was looking at 1920s newspapers is because I wanted to go back and read what columnists wrote about their MVP votes in the 1920s. And it's always been something that they've, they've acknowledged the ambiguity of, they've struggled with that ambiguity of it, they recognize that this is not a simple award that is just supposed to be who led the league in war or in anything else.

And in fact, as I wrote it, the MVP award's origin is explicitly a rejection of the batting title. It came out of the 1910 batting chase where, you know, at the time the winner got a car, I think, that Chalmers gave him a car and so then there was this farce in the last day where the players let um nap lodge away win over ty cobb and and so they uh they created an mvp award instead of having it just be who won this stat and so even back in the 1920s there was like i said there was a a lot of kind of internal discussion about what it means to be the most valuable player award. And is it more than who had the best slash line? Is it even more than who was the best player? Or is it just the best player? Nobody knew. Nobody ever knew. And

it has gradually become 90%, probably even closer than 90%, who was the best player. I mean, I interpret it 100% as who was the best player. I think, I interpret it 100% as who is the best player. I think most of us who root for Trout view it as 100%. There doesn't seem to be any particular value added to an individual person saying, well, I define value differently than you. And yet there's enough of that that it doesn't actually line up to the best player very well. For a half-written piece that was going to be about how Trout didn't win, I looked at every year's voting to see who finished higher, the war leader or the RBI leader. And the RBI leader finishes higher than the war leader. And that's really even basically,

even since war became real and people could consult with war, it's still basically split 50-50. And if you take out the Coors effect, where Coors hitters who are bad and everybody knows that they're not that good, have a better chance of winning the RBI title and not being taken all that seriously. If you take away that, then war is still a secondary data point for voters to RBIs. And so where was I going with that? Where I was going with that is that even though this is mostly a who is the best player award, it doesn't line up that well with who is best player.

The voting itself doesn't seem that intentional about having it line up with who is best player award. And when we assess it, when the votes come out and we go, well, that's not the best player. It seems absurd and scandalous and something that should really anger us. If there, he didn't even try to make it about the best player. If it were like 70% best player and 30% other stuff, I almost feel like the award would have more credibility because it wouldn't be failing at what it is nominally trying to do uh which i don't know that that would be any more satisfying and i'm not sure that there's a way that we're going to be happy with awards voting ever in anything like what's name anywhere that everybody's like the vote worked perfect all the time great

crash loved that movie perfect so the i mean I mean, I don't think that saying, well, this other flawed system that I could hypothesize might work would be 1% better than the flawed system we currently have. I don't really know how to argue for or against that position. But just as far as credibility, I don't. I'm sort of hoping that Trout would just keep losing. Yeah. Well, I think I found that the average MVP winner's team coming into this year or from 1931 through 2015, the average winning percentage of the team of an mvp winner was 593 yeah which is you know

like a 96 win pace right and so so the player himself at is going to average eight or nine right of that yeah i mean you'd expect the team with an mvp to be better than average i guess just knowing that they had an mvp but not by that much. Not by nearly that much. So obviously there's some bias there. Did we have the exact same day yesterday? What did you have for lunch? Some wraps. Ooh, what did I have for lunch? Because I was going to do the winning percentage thing too. And I ran out of time. Yeah. Well, I ran out of time, but I asked Dan Hirsch to do it for me, and he did. I kind of wonder whether, I think we talked about this on an episode at some point, maybe, or I think we might have talked about it with Jay Jaffe in relation to the Hall of Fame. But the fact that stats have gotten so much better, I really do think makes the MVP award more extraneous? I mean, now we are arguing over a win or two here and there. Well, it makes who was the best player award. Yes, right. It doesn't make the who's... Look, I think if you re-envision this award, not that I'm saying that this is what

it's anywhere close to or what it should be or anything like that. But if you re-envision this as what season do you want history to remember, then I think that it would be just as much fun to look at, to debate, to see the results of, and really ultimately to remember 75 years later, but without necessarily having the false precision that we're expecting out of this award right now. Yeah, I just, it's weird because we kind of like yada yada the awards that there's no objective standard for, like manager of the year or something. Like you and I used to abstain from voting on that when we did it at BP because we figured we just didn't know and how could we tell even. But the MVP is kind of the opposite of that, at least if you think of it as best player who cares what 30 people think we can look at a leaderboard and it's not perfect and you can go either way if two guys are very close but on the whole it's just a lot easier to settle arguments statistically now than it once was. If Trout and Cabrera had had the same seasons they had in 2012 in 1962 or something, you

could have had that debate forever and someone could have said this guy was a better hitter and the other person could have said this guy was a better base runner and fielder and there would have been no values that you could have attached to those things based on empirical formulas and observations that would sort of settle that question. So it was an open question. It was a matter of opinion as far as anyone was concerned because there was no fact really. And now we're not at fact, but we're a lot closer to fact. And as stats get better and StatCast starts to replace cruder methods, then we get even closer and closer and closer to that.

And so maybe it would be wise for the BBWA if they wanted their vote to stay relevant, to not have it be best player in baseball, because that's a question we don't need their help to answer. So it would be more interesting if their vote was, you know, like most pleasant person in the clubhouse or something, like something that only they know or that they know better than your average person who can look at a leaderboard. So I just, I don't know what role this voting plays anymore. I think Trout and the reception to Trout early in his career just kind of killed it for me. If it wasn't that already.

And so I have a hard time getting excited about Trout winning. And if he had lost, I would not have been upset about that either. Hey, you just said that the credibility, if they want to have their award have credibility. Do you actually think that the BBWA... Not credibility, but intrigue or something. Yeah, okay. Whatever word that would indicate that it is doing what they want it to or getting attention or whatever. Do you think that it is really any less relevant?

Relevant. I think you said relevant. Do you think that it's any less relevant than it ever has been? I mean, we're like talking about it. We are literally talking about it. We all wrote about it. We all, I mean, it's on TV now. They put it on the television. Like I remember I, my wife one time, uh, when I had like 800 followers, I was like, dude, I just got my 800th followerth follower and she goes you're not famous until you're on tv and this is on tv now yeah so do you think that this is actually an issue for them for anybody does anybody think that this isn't succeeding probably not the players like it the players seem to like it they show up for the the thing can i ask you a question though the sporting news

player of the year which came out a month ago it has you know traditionally tracked pretty well to mvp voting uh even though it's theoretically a different award but also it has different voters different rules but it tracks pretty well to mvp voting this year it didn't. Jose Altuve won the thing and he didn't get a single first place vote from AL voters. And Trout finished sixth behind Daniel Murphy. Not that, I don't know why I said behind Daniel Murphy, like Daniel Murphy wasn't phenomenal, but behind, behind, behind David Ortiz, for goodness sakes. Behind five players. Behind five players. Yeah. So why do you, what do you think that's about? Why do you think that there was such a large discrepancy between how people... I don't think that the name of the award matters. I don't think it can be explained as, oh, well, the name of the award. Because for one thing, Altuve's team was in a pennant race, and that usually is close enough for voters. So I don't think it's the value thing. I think that 300 Major League Baseball players actually thought Jose Altuve was the best player in baseball this year.

Well, I mean, in other votes, baseball players voting about baseball players has not been, I don't think, the most accurate measure of value. I don't know anything about the history of this award or how accurately it has tracked with other things. So if you're saying it usually does. It's very hard to find votes going back more than three or four years. I tried, I looked, and it was close. You would not, if you switched them, you wouldn't even really notice. I don't know what to make of that because I would think that baseball players would appreciate Mike Trout. So I would have said it had to do with his being on a losing team.

But if that hasn't historically been the case with that vote, I don't know. I think it has historically been a bit of the case, just like it is with MVP voting. But the MVP voting, if anything, you would think would favor the winning, the guy on the winning team more. And so therefore, like if it had gone the opposite, if Trout had won player of the year and Altuve had won MVP, that would have maybe made sense. Yeah. Based on the name, you know, based on the names of the awards. Yeah. I think the name of the award would make a difference for the writers vote. I think it would, but I don't know if it would for a player

voting. I can never tell what players are going to do. Generally, they're going to do, it seems like what the writers would have done 30 years ago. Do you believe, so there are 700 ish members of the BBWA and 30 of them voted on this award. Do you think that if we ran a million simulations where the voters were chosen at random for who would vote, of those million simulations, is there a greater than 1% of those where Altuve wins the MVP award? Where did he finish? Third? He finished third, but, and he, you know, got a ton of votes, but no first place votes, No first place votes, which is what makes it hard. Yeah, probably not then.

I don't know. I guess we could figure out the margin of error here, right? By the way, how mad are you that after all of your work, Zach Britton got 1 8th, 3 9th, and 2 10ths? That's got to just infuriate you. I didn't even notice I don't even know how he did in the Cy Young voting When did he finish? He didn't finish in the top three

But I think that your point was actually I think that you made a better case for him As MVP than as Cy Young So Cy Young he finished fourth He finished fourth with five First place votes So he did pretty well. Uh-huh. Okay. But of course, that wasn't what you were going for. So yeah, do we still Beltre got a first place vote or whatever the weird ones were, but I didn't look to see if there were any complete outlier players who got mentioned.

I'd still be somewhat interested in that. Was there any completely out of left field choice? I don't know. Like Juris Familia was only named on two ballots, but on both of them, he was named eighth place, which is like, those are weird little flukes. On Cy Young? No, on MVP. Really?

MVP? Yeah. Cy Young only goes five. Five deep. Like, it's always weird to me when, like Addison Russell, one ballot, finished sixth. Madison Bumgarner, two ballots, fifth and 10th. But otherwise, I don't know. Not really.

Not really. Brandon Crawford otherwise I don't know not really no not really Brandon Crawford I don't I actually I don't have anything to say about Brandon Crawford I think Brandon Crawford is a very legitimate person to put on your ballot and I am uh I was just shorthanding because my dad is listening and we uh we were so shocked that he didn't make the all-star game and I said he was going to be on MVP ballots. So that's why I just said his name. Hi, Dad. All right, so don't connect Mike Trout's worth to this vote either way. Mike Trout is awesome.

He is still the best player through his age ever. He has still had one of the best five-year stretches ever. He is still getting better in certain ways and evolving in certain ways. I thought a couple years ago that I was worried that we were going to see this slower, more strikeout-prone and more powerful version of Trout that we saw in the year he actually won the MVP award for the first time, which was the worst version of Trout. And I thought maybe he would just get more extreme in that direction and he'd still be really good, but it would be hard for him to be quite as amazing as he was when he was good at everything. And this year he was

basically back to being good at everything again. He was good at running. He stole 30 bases. He had his lowest strikeout rate ever relative to the league. He was more selective than ever before, walked more than ever before. Just, I mean, great all around. So he's the best. I don't think we ever failed to appreciate Mike Trout on this podcast. I don't think we ever failed to appreciate Mike Trout on this podcast. So my, yeah, I don't think we failed to, and I don't think that we were in danger of it, which is another thing that I got into in my piece. I think that these seem, so I was reading a piece that Jerome Holtzman wrote in 1987, and you'll know where it's coming from. The headline was, I think, most valuable, not always best. Okay. Or maybe it was the opposite. It might've been best, not always most valuable. And in it, he's like, I mean, if you were going with the best player, then sure, you'd vote for Tim Raines.

But, and then he makes the case for someone who's not Tim Raines. And 30 years later, you're like, that's literally why Tim Raines is not in the Hall of fame like if he had won that mvp award i bet you he's a hall of famer but you know for tim raines he always sort of had to struggle to uh get recognized as the best player uh like you know he like if this has been documented but he was compared he wasn't the best he's the second best leadoff hitter of all time but he was compared to the best leadoff hitter of all time. He might be the second or third best base stealer of all time, but he was playing alongside the best base stealer of all time. And in the same sort of way, he had two years where I would say he was indisputably the best player in the National League. Maybe not indisputably, but the best player in the National League for those two years.

And he finished sixth and seventh in MVP voting. And I think that that matters. When you're trying to remember a guy's career 30 years down the road, you can go look at his stats, but you're like, what? How did Olympic Stadium play? I don't really remember. What was the offensive environment like in 1983? I don't really remember. And so you do a quick pass of his page, and you see the black ink, and you see the awards voting. And for a guy like Tim Raines, it matters. And for a guy like Alan Trammell, I think same thing. If he wins the MVP award in 1987 when he should have won it, I was ready to feed into your anger if he lost. But the fact that he wins, I think it's a nice thing to notice. We nod at it. We wait and see next year what the voting looks like before we draw any real conclusions. It's a good outcome that, yeah, I think like you say, It doesn't really change Mike Trout too much

Yeah he's too good to be a Borderline candidate whose Case will be swayed one way or another Or legacy will be swayed one way or another By one award vote or Or even three award votes so Yeah alright So that is it for today

You can support the podcast by going to Patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have done so already, Matt Richards, Ketia Perlman, Miguel, Anthony, and Jacob Baldorama. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. You can get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index at baseballreference.com using the coupon code BP. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team.

Check out the website at theonlyrulesithastowork.com. Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. Talked a little bit about award voting. Also talked about the Astros. And we interviewed Brian Dozier about his fascinating season. Reviews for that podcast on iTunes are also very much appreciated. You can contact me and Sam at podcast at baseball

prospectus dot com or by messaging us through Patreon. Have a wonderful weekend. We will be back next week. Don't spend time listening to people's words. I'm out.