AL MVP Race: Bobby Witt Jr. is putting together an MVP-caliber season at the wrong time

Bobby Witt is having an all-time great season, especially for a shortstop. Going back to 1969, only two shortstops have put up more than 10 fWAR, 1991 Cal Ripken Jr. and 2002 Alex Rodriguez. For bWAR there are three including Ripken, Rodriguez, and Rico Petrocelli who I will come back to again later as he is the only baseball player in history with a 10+ WAR season that I had never heard of before. Witt is on pace to join their ranks. He currently has 9.6 WAR per Fangraphs and 8.9 on Baseball Reference. He has played every game this season and is on a per 162 game pace of 11.1 and 10.4 respectively.

It’s not just WAR either. Among qualified shortstops since 1969, he ranks eighth in batting average, sixth in slugging, and first in wRC+. It’s hard to tell where he will end up with the counting stats, but he is likely going to be 30/30 and already has 117 runs and 97 RBI. It is just a straight up monster season, and yet he is not going to win the MVP. In almost any other year, or heck in the National League this year, he would likely win it easily. Unfortunately for Witt, Aaron Judge is having possibly the greatest (non-steroid aided) modern season at the plate that we have ever seen.

Plenty of people are giving lots of stats about how great Judge is and you can read them at your leisure. He is on pace to hit right around 60 home runs, but with what he has been doing lately, might break his own American League record. His wRC+ is 223 which means he is 123% better than the average hitter in the league. Witt will probably win the batting title, but Judge is second. His OBP is .464, and nobody without the last name Bonds has done anything like this level of production in the 2000s. Go back further and only Ted Williams and Babe Ruth join the party.

So, Witt is very likely going to finish second in MVP voting this year, and it just made me wonder who the best players to lose out on the MVP have been. These break down into a few groups, but first I’ll show you the top 10 according to Fangraphs and Baseball Reference WAR. Then we will delve a little deeper into how they ended up missing out on the hardware. I will avoid pitchers for simplicity’s sake. They don’t win often and have their own award which muddies the water.

You can see that that the two formulations don’t particularly agree what this top 10 should look like, but it is more that I am using an arbitrary cut off at top ten. For instance, Mike Trout 2018 is just outside the Fangraphs list. Regardless, this gives a good list of player years that would normally be MVPs, but due to some bad voting, luck, or timing, they did not get the award. That happened in a few different ways, so I am going to group them into those archetypes. We will save the most ludicrous for last. Also, Witt is on pace to eclipse all of them.

Three of these players lost in the same way it looks like Witt is going to. They had an incredible year, but someone else was even better. Two of them ran into peak Barry Bonds when he won four consecutive MVPs from 2001 to 2004. Sammy Sosa’s great 2001 had no chance against 73 home runs. Ditto for Adrian Beltre in 2004 when Bonds had a 212 wRC+. All the normal Barry Bonds caveats apply, but cheating or not, he was the best player by the numbers and much of the league still had their blinders on. Mike Trout ran into another great player in 2018. Mookie Betts had a phenomenal season, better than Trout’s probably and Betts had never gotten an MVP before. The voters’ tendency to get bored of giving it to the same people over and over made it nearly inevitable. The next group probably should not have lost, but at least you can see the argument

Understandable but probably not right:

Jason Giambi had an MVP caliber year in 2000, and when you compare him to Alex Rodriguez it is not crazy that he won. Giambi hit 43 homers and Rodriguez finished with 41. Giambi had a few more RBI and A-Rod scored more runs. Overall, Giambi was just a better hitter that season by most metrics including all three slashes where he hit .333/.476/.647. WAR likes Rodriguez better based on defense, both quality and the position he played. That was still the Seattle based shortstop version of Rodriguez, and he was really good. Giambi was a BAD first baseman. The defensive difference between those two is massive. He probably didn’t deserve the award, but at least I understand what happened. The only defensible choice over Rodriguez would have been Pedro Martinez who was unbelievable that year.

In 1973, Pete Rose had a very Pete Rose season, but just a bit better than all the others. He collected 230 hits and managed a .338 average while getting on base 40% of the time. By all modern defensive metrics, it was also his best season in the field. He ended up at 7.3 fWAR and 8.3 bWAR. In 2024 the slugging discrepancy between him and Darrell Evans would have been understood much better. Evans hit 41 home runs and slugged .556 finishing second in that statistic. Rose hit five homers and his .437 slugging percentage was fine, but way behind Evans. Evans just played in the wrong era to win based on the mix of statistics he produced, but he also lost to someone who was only slightly less fantastic. Still, Evans finished 18th in the voting.

Now the most memorable MVP discussion of my lifetime because I was very much in the online baseball community during it. Miguel Cabrera won the MVP in both 2012 and 2013. In those two seasons Mike Trout took second place in both votes. It is pretty easy to explain what happened in 2013. Cabrera won the triple crown, which had not been done since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Trout had a phenomenal season, but the history of the triple crown makes me think the gap in WAR of one and a half or so by both estimations was not enough. The 2012 vote was the one that I would really take issue with.

They were nearly the same from a hitting perspective. Cabrera has an edge in slugging, but they were almost identical after park adjustments and such. I think Trout being a rookie hurt him a lot because voters could assume he was already going to get a big award, so they could split and make sure both players get an honor. I just think the gap in defense, both position played and how much better Trout was at the tougher job, was so big that it is absurd to say Cabrera was more deserving.

The curious case of Rico Petrocelli was not one I was expecting to see going into this. Petrocelli manned short throughout the back half of the 60s for the Red Sox and then switched and covered third for the first half of the 70s. He was a good player, not Hall of Fame good, but a solid everyday guy for 10 years. He was usually worth 2 to 4 WAR, but in 1969 he doubled his WAR output relative to any other season by putting up 10. Harmon Killebrew beat him out for the award with a solid, though unspectacular season. He led the league in home runs and RBI while amassing 145 walks. Killebrew was good, but he was pretty rough over at third base and only okay when he played first. Despite Killebrew having 17 more homers than Petrocelli, their slugging percentages were .584 and .589 respectively. Petrocelli had a better average and slugging percentage, and he was an incredible shortstop. He was fourth in fielding percentage and made the fewest errors of any regular shortstop in baseball, just fewer attempts for whatever reason, which pushed the fielding percentage down a bit. It was comparable in modern terms to what Bobby Witt is doing now defensively. Killebrew had the big name and out hit him slightly, so Petrocelli had to settle for a seventh place finish in the MVP voting. He sadly never even won a Gold Glove, which he would have done many times by modern metrics.

The egregiously bad MVP decisions:

We are done with the understandable outcomes, now on to some of the indefensible nonsense that MVP voting has rent in the past. Starting with a classic in 1985 where Don Mattingly took home the award over Rickey Henderson. Rickey would tell you that Rickey was the best baseball player, and in 1985 he was. He hit .314/.419/.516 while scoring 146 runs and stealing 80 bases. His slugging percentage should always be adjusted since half of his walks and singles turn into doubles. Don Mattingly hit .324/.371/.567 while playing lousy first base defense. No one ever charged him with an error though, and so it seemed like he was good and he won several gold gloves. He also played for a good Yankees team while Henderson was on a very mediocre Oakland team. It was not a good choice, but some of the upcoming ones are so much worse.

The 2002 version of Miguel Tejada led the league in nothing. Well, except for games played, I guess. It was a fine season, but not an MVP caliber one. Alex Rodriguez meanwhile was spectacular. He hit 57 home runs and had 142 RBIs to Tejada’s 108. Tejada outhit A-Rod by .008 in average but Rodriguez crushed him in on-base and slugging. Unfortunately, the Rangers were last in their division while Oakland won it, and the voters thought that was enough to make up for the 4+ WAR gap in production. Clearly Tejada didn’t have the better season, even some of the voters would concede that, but his team made the playoffs so he was “more valuable”.

The next one is personal for me. Ken Griffey Jr. has a lot to do with why I am writing about baseball right now. He was my favorite player as a kid, and I remember getting up every morning and turning on SportsCenter to see if he hit a home run the night before. Juan Gonzalez almost matched Griffey as a hitter in 1996. Griffey finished 49 home runs and 140 RBIs while Gonzalez had 47 and 144. Their OPSes were 1.020 and 1.011, so it looks like they were pretty close to even. Here’s the rub though, Arlington was a very friendly park to hit in while the Kingdome was a very average park, so Griffey was doing it in hard mode. Oh yeah, and he was one of the best center fielders of all time that season versus a bad corner outfielder. Griffey should have won this easily, or at least it could have gone to his teammate, Rodriguez, who would have also been deserving that year.

Mike Schmidt led all of baseball in home runs and slugging in 1974. He was second in runs and third in RBIs. He was an exceptional third baseman. And he still lost to Steve Garvey in the MVP vote. He also finished behind Lou Brock, Mike Marshall, Johnny Bench, and Jim Wynn. Garvey hit .312 and drove in 111, so he wasn’t bad or anything. He just didn’t do anything that stands out. He won a Gold Glove at first base? That’s all I got. It just doesn’t make any sense except that Schmidt struck out too much for that era.

Finally, the last and most ridiculous of the bunch. Can you imagine putting up an all-time great season as a shortstop and then watching a relief pitcher win the MVP over you? In 1984 Cal Ripken Jr. finished the year fifth in the AL in wRC+, hitting .304/.374/.510 while scoring 103 runs and driving in 86. He had the best offensive WAR by Baseball Reference because of the positional adjustment. He was also the highest defensive WAR. He won the 1983 MVP so maybe people didn’t want to give it to him again? Ripken not only lost the vote, he finished 27th? I am not old enough to remember this time period, but it is baffling to look at with 2024 eyes. The winner that year was Willie Hernandez who threw 140.1 innings in relief for Detroit. He had the best ERA for any AL reliever at 1.92, but second was 2.03, so not exactly otherworldly. Two other AL relievers had more saves. Hernandez also won the Cy Young Award even though Mike Boddicker had a 20-win season. In 1983 Jesse Orosco had a much better relief season and finished third. I feel like there was something else that caused this. There is no way that many voters really thought Hernandez had an MVP season. Cal Ripken Jr. can add to his trophy collection the worst treatment in an MVP vote of all time.