With all of the Hall of Fame talk coming to a head with the election of four new Hall of Famers this week, I got thinking about baseball accolades, and specifically, the MVP. For many voters, MVP awards are an important criterion on a player's figurative Hall of Fame checklist (along with other more-or-less useless criteria, like wins and saves).
However, the definition of baseball's "most valuable" player is almost as jumbled as the definition of a win or a save. Does it refer to baseball's best player? The player who helped his team the most (the most valuable to his team)? The best player on one of the league's best teams? I decided to take a look at which players since 1965 have fit the literal definition of MVP - which offered the most value to his team relative to his teammates. Below is a table of the 19 most "valuable" seasons by players in the past 50 years, in which a bolded player's name denotes that he won the MVP award while an italicized name denotes that he received the Cy Young Award. All information was courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com, and I used its equation for WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for the purposes of this data.
Raise your hand if you have ever considered Phillies starting pitcher Steve Carlton to be the most valuable player of all time. Nobody? Okay then. Well, in 1972, Carlton tossed an unreal 346.1 innings - about 23.7 percent of all possible innings for the Phillies, assuming no extra inning games - while posting a 1.97 ERA (and 182 ERA+, suggesting he pitched 82 percent better than your average pitcher in 1972) and a crazy 2.01 FIP. His 12.5 WAR was responsible for over one-fifth of all 59 of the Phillies' wins that season, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
You've probably noticed that most of the top 19 players here were starting pitchers; 14, to be precise, when counting the unlikely Phil Niekro twice. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when these pitchers pitched, it wasn't uncommon for them to hurl upwards of 250 or 300 innings in a season, whereas these days, a pitcher is considered to be unbreakable if he makes it to 220 or 230 innings. Therefore, starting pitchers affected their team with their production a few decades ago simply because they pitched more. Dwight Gooden stands out in particular; in his sophomore season, his production attributed for over one-eighth of the Mets' 98 wins. It makes sense that most of the players on this list were exceptional players playing for bad or even terrible teams, as the nature of the question suggests that a player must vastly outshine his teammates, but Gooden (who coincidentally posted the highest WAR total on the list) managed to account for a large portion of his team's production even when surrounded by above-average teammates such as Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry.
However, the definition of baseball's "most valuable" player is almost as jumbled as the definition of a win or a save. Does it refer to baseball's best player? The player who helped his team the most (the most valuable to his team)? The best player on one of the league's best teams? I decided to take a look at which players since 1965 have fit the literal definition of MVP - which offered the most value to his team relative to his teammates. Below is a table of the 19 most "valuable" seasons by players in the past 50 years, in which a bolded player's name denotes that he won the MVP award while an italicized name denotes that he received the Cy Young Award. All information was courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com, and I used its equation for WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for the purposes of this data.
Raise your hand if you have ever considered Phillies starting pitcher Steve Carlton to be the most valuable player of all time. Nobody? Okay then. Well, in 1972, Carlton tossed an unreal 346.1 innings - about 23.7 percent of all possible innings for the Phillies, assuming no extra inning games - while posting a 1.97 ERA (and 182 ERA+, suggesting he pitched 82 percent better than your average pitcher in 1972) and a crazy 2.01 FIP. His 12.5 WAR was responsible for over one-fifth of all 59 of the Phillies' wins that season, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
You've probably noticed that most of the top 19 players here were starting pitchers; 14, to be precise, when counting the unlikely Phil Niekro twice. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when these pitchers pitched, it wasn't uncommon for them to hurl upwards of 250 or 300 innings in a season, whereas these days, a pitcher is considered to be unbreakable if he makes it to 220 or 230 innings. Therefore, starting pitchers affected their team with their production a few decades ago simply because they pitched more. Dwight Gooden stands out in particular; in his sophomore season, his production attributed for over one-eighth of the Mets' 98 wins. It makes sense that most of the players on this list were exceptional players playing for bad or even terrible teams, as the nature of the question suggests that a player must vastly outshine his teammates, but Gooden (who coincidentally posted the highest WAR total on the list) managed to account for a large portion of his team's production even when surrounded by above-average teammates such as Keith Hernandez and Darryl Strawberry.
According to the above table, only two of the top 19 "most valuable" players received the MVP award during their valuable season. This may be due to the fact that only five hitters are represented on the list, and voters are loathe to gift pitchers the MVP, except for in exceptional circumstances. Indeed, seven pitchers received the Cy Young during their valuable seasons, but were still not deemed the most valuable players during their respective seasons.
Let's fast-forward a bit to the 21st century and check out which players using this definition of most valuable were the league's most valuable in each year since 2000. Given numerous dominant offensive performances during the latter portion of the Steroid Era, the table's members may not be as surprising as those on the previous table.
Names such as Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez might be expected, but only two players (Bonds twice, A-Rod once) received the MVP award during the season in which they led to league in percentage of team WAR. Bonds is clearly the most impressive player on the list, as he managed to make up 12 and 10 percent, respectively, of his team's total WAR as his team won 90 and 95 games, respectively. Most of the players' teams were not so great, with Trout's 2012 Angels being an exception. Perhaps the epitome of a dominant player stuck on a bad team was Zack Greinke in 2009, pitching his way to a Cy Young despite languishing on a 65-win Royals team.
Let's fast-forward a bit to the 21st century and check out which players using this definition of most valuable were the league's most valuable in each year since 2000. Given numerous dominant offensive performances during the latter portion of the Steroid Era, the table's members may not be as surprising as those on the previous table.
Names such as Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez might be expected, but only two players (Bonds twice, A-Rod once) received the MVP award during the season in which they led to league in percentage of team WAR. Bonds is clearly the most impressive player on the list, as he managed to make up 12 and 10 percent, respectively, of his team's total WAR as his team won 90 and 95 games, respectively. Most of the players' teams were not so great, with Trout's 2012 Angels being an exception. Perhaps the epitome of a dominant player stuck on a bad team was Zack Greinke in 2009, pitching his way to a Cy Young despite languishing on a 65-win Royals team.
There's no doubt that looking at "value" through this definition favors good players on bad teams, but implies a perfectly legitimate lens through which to define a most valuable player. The data above suggests that using such criteria to select an MVP would generally lead to acceptable outcomes, despite punishing players who are surrounded by above-average teammates.