As we head into the final month of the baseball season, the MVP race in both leagues is shaping up to be pretty interesting, as Mike Petriello outlined over at MLB.com. For most of the season it looked like Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani would each run away the award, but lately Bobby Witt, Jr. and Francisco Lindor have made compelling cases that they deserve the award — Lindor has passed Ohtani in FanGraphs WAR, and Witt is only slightly behind Judge.
To be clear, the favorites are still the favorites: Judge and Ohtani each still have much better odds according the betting markets, and comfortable leads in Baseball Reference WAR. But things could still get interesting over the final month.
And while I’m hoping Judge hits 75 home runs this year, I still kind of want the MVP races to stay competitive. We haven’t had a real MVP race in either league since 2019. Since then there have been three unanimous winners and a bunch of other fait accomplis; the only time the winner was really in doubt before the vote was announced was when Bryce Harper won the NL MVP in 2021.
It’s not that I think any of the winners since then were undeserved, but I worry that the league is herding around too homogenous a view of “value.” Last year’s NL MVP race was very revealing. Ronald Acuña Jr. had a great season, but so did Mookie Betts and Matt Olson and Freddie Freeman, and yet nobody besides Acuña got a single MVP vote. Was he really so OBVIOUSLY better than the competition that nobody would dare vote for someone else? Or is there a bit of groupthink going on here?
This is bad not just because groupthink is bad, but because such uniform assessments of value can become dangerous tools in the hands of people trying to measure worker productivity. It is wise to be wary of any precision in how we can quantify individual value, since those tools will often be used by bosses against workers. As a baseball fan, I used to roll my eyes when people said things like, “The MVP is an award for the most VALUABLE player, not the BEST player” as if the word “value” had some mysterious meaning that was totally subjective. But now I worry we’ve gone too far the other way, and that people following baseball are TOO confident in their sense of every players’ value, like they’re tallying up widgets on an assembly line.
Anyway, here’s everything from Undrafted this month:
Why I Don’t Like the Olympics
Did you know that the 100-meter dash ends when a player’s TORSO “as distinguished from the head, neck, arms, legs, hands or feet” crosses the vertical plane of the finish line? I did not, but this information proved crucial in determining the outcome of Saturday’s Olympic men’s race, who turned out to be Noah Lyles after a photo finish.
Oh yeah, the Olympics happened! People seemed to like them this year, which I can only attribute to the strength of the left wing in recent French parliamentary elections.
Hearts and Minds and Slurs
I share the above tweet not to exaggerate the importance of Ryan Spaeder’s Twitter account, which is one of those sports feeds that farms engagement by posting dozens of Fun Facts and then slips in one right-wing rant. But whenever something like the Jarren Duran controversy happens — the Red Sox outfielder was suspended this week for two games as punis…
On punishing players for hate speech.
Episode 49: NBA vs. NLRB (ft. Matt Bruenig)
Today the Lefty Specialists are joined by Matt Bruenig, author of labor newsletter NLRB Edge, and together we discuss whether the rule the NBA uses to fine players is illegal, how unions can fight for free speech in general, and the connections between sports union fights and labor movement in general. (We also, of course, discuss
An interview with Matt Bruenig on the legal rights of NBA players and workers everywhere.
Thoughts on Tua, Brian Flores, and Abusive Bosses
It was already well-known that Tua Tagovailoa and his former head coach, Brian Flores, did not get along. But he went into more detail in a very candid and revealing interview this week with Dan LeBatard. The whole interview is worth listening to, but the part that really made the rounds came at the end:
Get ready for football season with some thoughts on the latest Brian Flores controversy!
Doping is a Labor Issue
I’ll admit that I didn’t pay much attention to the Professional Tennis Players Association when it was first announced a few years ago. Launched amid Covid-19, the PTPA seemed borne out of the confusion around how various tennis tournaments were handling the pandemic, a view that seemed to be confirmed when Novak Djokovic, one of the organization’s foun…
On the Professional Tennis Players Association, but really, on why players themselves should be in charge of drug testing in sports.