The season is coming to an end and besides the playoff races, the race for the awards is also coming to a head. As far as MVP is concerned, a duel emerges in the American League – Mookie Betts against Mike Trout. Who’s ahead?
Without devaluing other candidates, it should be clear from the outset that only Trout and Betts can be seriously considered. Surely other players also provide appealing arguments. Francisco Lindor, for example, leads the league in Runs (119), while J.D. Martinez leads the top 2 in the home runs (40) and RBI (121). And Jose Ramirez and Alex Bregman also play great seasons overall.
We leave out another killer argument: team success! No, for MVP in baseball it should not be relevant whether his team is overall outstanding (Red Sox) or once again completely failed (Angels). The most valuable player is known to be the one who helps his team the most to be successful.
So we just hide the tables of AL West and East and just look at the performances of the two players. And they are surprisingly close to each other in many respects. We leave the conventional mass statistics out and take the figures for advanced users.
The top offensive statistics of FanGraphs, “Weighted Runs Created Plus” (wRC+), shows how effectively a player has contributed to the run production. The “plus” in this case stands for the elimination of any environmental factors such as the ball park and so on.
In this category, Trout leads with 192 over Betts’ 180, both figures indicating that both players are 92 to 80 percent better at run production than the league average. The next best in this list would be Martinez with 171, followed by Bregman (165). So we’re talking about serious differences with other competitors, which is the best explanation why only the two are possible.
Things that play in are a player’s ability to get on base and how they do it. This means: A home run gets a higher value than a walk or single. The value that fits best here is the Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) and here, too, both are clearly ahead of the competition. Trout leads with .447 in front of Betts (.442).
Even when it comes to “Base Running” (BsR), the two are very close together. Trout is just ahead of Betts (5.6) with 5.9. Here not only the stealing of bases plays a role, but also the acquisition of an additional base in certain situations.
Betts, on the other hand, is showing a remarkable difference in the strike-out quota. It only receives a “K” in 13.9 percent of its plate appliances and 20.1 percent at Trout. At Trout, the walk rate is 20.3 percent, Betts has only one walk in 13.1 percent of the PAs. In return, however, its impact average is correspondingly higher.
Betts is also just in front with 9.1 wins above replacement compared to Trout’s 8.8, who has lost his historic pace of more than twelve due to a longer injury break. As far as the direct comparison is concerned, however, the figures are easy to compare, as both have each played 125 games to date.
Perhaps the most blatant difference, which ultimately led to the higher WAR of Betts, we see in the defense! Betts as Right Fielder gets a UZR/150 of 21.2 – Trout as Center Fielder is 2.1. 4 “Defensive Runs Saved”, Betts 18!
To explain: UZR stands for “Ultimate Zone Rating” and contains metrics for the throwing abilities of an outfielder, the general range of a player and how many runs he causes by his own mistakes. And the 150 merely states that the value was scaled to an average number of defensive opportunities.
So far we have seen that in most offensive categories Trout is just ahead of Betts, while Betts is responsible for just more wins and plays much better defense.
Without getting into the situation of weighing offense and defense against each other, we now look at another category from the FanGraphs catalogue, the WPA – Win Probability Added. This value indicates how the winning probability of a team changes when the respective player steps to the board.
First: The top people in this view are neither Trout nor Betts, but Bregman (5.45) and Martinez (5.11). Betts is third with 4.92, Trout only sixth with 3.68. The value is cumulative, which means that whoever plays more can easily reach a higher value. And Betts had just under 20 plate appliances more.
If you go one step further and look at the so-called “Context Neutral Wins” – WPA/LI – then Trout is again ahead of Betts’ 5.24 at 6.3. But what does that even mean? First, “LI” stands for “Leverage Index” and trivially describes how high the pressure is for a player in a certain situation when he steps to the board.
This value was usually slightly higher for Betts than for Trout, which in turn explains the higher corrugator. But if you disregard that, Trout increased his team’s expectation of victory more than Betts.
If I had to type about half a month before the end of the season, I would tell Betts, because ultimately the inclined voter will be blinded by the discrepancy between the Angels and Red Sox.
In contrast to other problematic years, however, it would not be a completely wrong decision. Rather, it would be a statement of electoral justice that Defense also has a certain value, while Betts is offensively not decisively worse, but almost equally good.
So an American League MVP Mookie Betts would be more than justifiable, even if the best player of our time – and many other times – were to finish second. For the fourth time, by the way.
This article was published without previous view by the Major League Baseball.