Wading Into the AL MVP Debate
As we enter the final weeks of baseball’s regular season, I feel the time has come for me to render judgment on who the socialist left should back in this year’s American League MVP race. The choice has essentially come down to Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees versus Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels, and it raises some interesting philosophical questions.
Judge, of course, is having a historic season by virtually every offensive metric. He has 59 home runs with 16 games left to play, meaning he could very possibly (don’t jinx it) break Roger Maris’ AL-record for home runs in a single season. Perhaps even more impressive is that he is 20 home runs ahead of the next closest player in baseball – nobody besides Babe Ruth has ever led the majors in home runs by more than 17. On top of all that, Judge is now just single percentage point behind the league-leader in batting average, meaning he could become just the second triple crown winner in the last 55 seasons (and just the fifth in the post-integration era).
On the other hand, you have Shohei Ohtani, who continues to do what pretty much everyone thought was impossible until last season: He is simultaneously elite as a hitter (he’s fourth in the AL in home runs, with a 149 OPS+) and as a pitcher (he leads the league in strikeouts per 9 innings, and has a 164 ERA+).
So the question is: Do you reward success by traditional metrics, or a player who is redefining what is possible? This is a tough question for the left – I think a strong pro-labor case can be made for Ohtani, who is pushing back against management’s attempts to turn all players into replaceable cogs so that they don’t have to pay special players.
But I think the actual answer is Judge,* because of how we ought to assess individual value.
*Surely my own personal Yankee fandom has nothing to do with this conclusion…
It has become a little passé to suggest that team success should play a role in MVP voting. Last year, both league MVPs were awarded to players from teams that missed the playoffs, and almost every year of the last decade, at least one winner came from a losing team. Voters, and most fans, generally recognize that, in baseball, a team’s success or lack thereof cannot be pinned on one player, and so shouldn’t have much to do with deciding who is valuable. In fact, we have gotten pretty good at isolating an individual’s value, regardless of what his teammates do around him. And so while team success can sometimes be a useful tie-breaker, it is no longer controversial to give the award to guys on terrible teams, like Mike Trout in 2016 and 2019, or Giancarlo Stanton in 2017.
But Ohtani represents an interesting conundrum. Precisely because he is such a historical outlier, I don’t think we can be confident that our usual ways of assessing value apply to Ohtani. We have a general idea of how valuable a DH who hits .266 with 34 home runs, and we have a general idea of how valuable a starting pitcher who throws 148 innings with a 2.43 ERA is. Of course, neither player would ever be seriously considered for MVP in normal circumstances – but that’s because it’s usually not the same player. And the most obvious thing to do is just add the value of both players together.*
*Although it’s worth pointing out that doing that, at least according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference Wins Above Replacement, Ohtani’s value is still less than Judge’s this season.
But that doesn’t really work, because putting those players together impacts the team in unusual ways. For one, since Ohtani is in the lineup every day and therefore not getting the recovery time that most starters get, he cannot pitch more than once a week. This means that the Angels have to use a six-man rotation – no Angels starter has pitched on regular rest all season. How has this impacted their performance? Have the Angels suffered from not being able to use their better starters, like Patrick Sandoval, more frequently? Ohtani also does not pitch as deep into games that most aces do – he averages fewer than six innings per start and has only pitched into the seventh inning eight times. How has this impacted the bullpen, which typically benefit from the periodic rest provided by a reliable ace?
On the offensive side, Ohtani is a full-time DH – indeed, he has not played a single inning in the field, apart from the games he has pitched. This is pretty unusual; even regular Designated Hitters can provide SOME defensive value in a pinch. Giancarlo Stanton, Yordan Alvarez, and Eloy Jimenez have all played dozens of games in the outfield for their teams. I believe the only other DH in the American League to not play the field at all is JD Martinez – whose team is in last place and also likely to finish below .500. The obvious rejoinder is that whatever defensive value you lose in a full-time DH is surely made up for by Ohtani’s contributions on the mound.
But are we sure about that? Having flexibility in the DH role allows teams to rest players throughout the year without completely taking them out of the lineup. Might that have helped keep Mike Trout healthy, who missed ~40 games with a back issue? Or Taylor Ward, who was playing his first season as an everyday player and fell off dramatically after the first two months of the year?
Of course, we don’t know the answers to these questions, and given that what Ohtani is doing is basically unprecedented, it’s likely we can’t ever know. But we DO know this: The Angels are very bad. They are not bad BECAUSE of Shohei Ohtani (they were bad before he got there, after all); but perhaps his unique skillset has downsides we cannot account for simply because what he’s doing is so unusual. We know Aaron Judge’s season is helping the team because we have over a hundred seasons of data about how dominant hitting centerfielders help their teams. We don’t have the same kind of precedent for Ohtani.
“Who cares?” you might ask. “What Shohei Ohtani is AMAZING, and deserves to be recognized BECAUSE it is unprecedented.” I wouldn’t disagree with that, and indeed I sang Ohtani’s praises last year; I’m certainly not saying Ohtani should stop doing what he’s doing. The Angels owe it to fans everywhere to try to make it work.
From a socialist perspective, though, we must remember that a worker’s goal is not individual excellence, but contributing to the success of the overall project. This doesn’t mean the MVP can’t ever come from a losing team; we can be confident that Trout or Stanton contributed to their ballclubs in those MVP seasons. But until the Angels prove that a team with a player like Ohtani can win, we have to reserve judgment about the precise value of Ohtani’s uniqueness.