By Rustin Dodd / The Athletic
The duel between Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees and Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals for American League MVP is reminiscent of a classic of the genre.
On one side is a slugger vying for baseball’s triple crown, leading the league in on-base plus slugging percentage and flirting with 60 homers. On the other is a transcendent five-tool star hitting 30 homers, stealing 30 bases and playing exemplary defense at shortstop.
It would be easy, at first glance, to see a parallel to 2012, when Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers, who led the league in home runs, batting average and runs batted in, edged the Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout.
But the comparison comes with one problem: Cabrera versus Trout was a convenient proxy battle for old school versus new school. (Trout had significant leads in WAR, or wins above replacement.) Yet for most of this summer, Judge has played the role of both Cabrera and Trout, chasing a triple crown while hurtling toward 10.0 WAR and beyond.
Entering Wednesday’s action, Judge led Witt in Baseball Reference’s calculation of WAR (bWAR, 9.8 to 9.1) and FanGraphs’ (fWAR, 10.2 to 9.9). The margins are slim when considering the variance of the wins above replacement metric, yet when paired with his offensive fireworks, Judge is a heavy favorite in the betting markets to take home his second MVP Award in three seasons.
The muted conversations over Judge versus Witt — as well as Shohei Ohtani versus Francisco Lindor in the National League — have illustrated a recent shift in MVP voting, conducted each year by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
If Judge is crowned AL MVP, it will most likely be the sixth time in seven years that the award goes to a position player with the most Baseball Reference WAR. (It could also be the fifth time in seven years that the AL MVP is the leader in fWAR.)
Twelve years after Cabrera versus Trout, the voting trends underscore an intriguing relationship between WAR and the MVP Award: Baseball writers have never been more educated on the merits, flaws and limitations of wins above replacement, an advanced metric with multiple forms that has revolutionized how the sport views overall value. And yet they have also never been more likely to select an MVP who sits atop the WAR leaderboards.
In some ways, the relationship is simple enough: Gone are the days when MVPs won on the backs of runs batted in and puffed-up narratives. The advent of WAR offered a framework for value that has produced a more informed electorate. But as the MVP aligns with the WAR leaderboards, it is easy to wonder: Have MVP voters, in the aggregate, become too confident in WAR’s ability to determine overall value?
“If you’re a voter in a season like this and all you do before you cast your ballot is sort our leaderboards and grab the name at the top, I don’t think you’re doing your diligence,” Meg Rowley, the managing editor of FanGraphs, said in an email. “First, that approach assumes a precision that WAR doesn’t have.”
Judge and Ohtani — who, in his first year in the NL, could be the first player with 50 homers and 50 stolen bases — have leads in bWAR that are well within the statistic’s margin of error. (Entering Wednesday, Lindor led Ohtani in fWAR, 7.4 to 7.0.)
“No one should view a half-a-win difference as definitive as to who was more valuable,” Sean Forman, the founder of Baseball Reference, said in an email.
The story of wins above replacement is really the story of baseball in the 21st century. It began, roughly speaking, in the early 1980s with Bill James and Pete Palmer.
James, the godfather of sabermetrics, was using a primitive concept of “replacement level” to rank players in his annual Baseball Abstract. Palmer had introduced the system of “linear weights,” which determined an offensive player’s value in runs compared to a baseline average. By the 1990s, Keith Woolner developed value over replacement player, or VORP. With the basic ideas in place, improvement continued for another 15 years.
What emerged was a consensus: an overall metric that measured a player’s offense, defense and base running in “runs above replacement” and then converted that number into wins: WAR.
There was no official formula, which meant websites developed their own versions. The crude nature of metrics for defense and base running meant WAR was often noisy in small samples. But the statistic presented a solution for one of baseball’s eternal problems.
FanGraphs began publishing its WAR statistic in December 2008, while Baseball Reference unveiled its variation for the 2009 season, before an overhaul in 2012. The metric’s public arrival offered more than just a better mousetrap. The sites could retroactively calculate WAR, which meant past MVP votes were subject to review.
Willie Mays, for instance, led the NL in bWAR 10 times. He won two MVP Awards.
To look back is to see what the sport valued at a given moment. Whether it was the Cincinnati Reds’ Joe Morgan in the 1970s, Robin Yount in 1982, Cal Ripken Jr. in 1983 or Ryne Sandberg in 1984, baseball writers often rewarded players with versatile skill sets who led the league in bWAR (if anyone would have known how to calculate it). They also gave the award to relief pitchers three times from 1981 to 1992.
One of the most predictive statistics for MVP Award winners was RBI. From 1956 to 1989, the RBI leader won the MVP 50% of the time in the NL and 47% of the time in the AL. (Since 1999, the NL RBI leader has won the MVP just 8% of the time, while the AL RBI leader has won it 24% of the time.)
“It was very different,” said Larry Stone, a columnist at The Seattle Times who started covering baseball in 1987. “I’m almost — not ashamed, but embarrassed. I think I just looked at the counting stats, mainly; home runs, average and RBI were huge. And often, the tiebreaker was the team’s performance. There was not much sophistication back in those days.”
Of course, it was also true that sometimes the MVP was blatantly obvious. When Barry Bonds won four straight MVPs in the early 2000s, he led the league in bWAR each time. When Albert Pujols broke Bonds’ streak in 2005, he, too, led the league in bWAR. As supporters of WAR often point out, the basic offensive numbers in the formula are the same ones we have measured for the last century.
The data on MVP voting, however, started to shift in the 2000s as WAR entered the public square. Noticing the trends, a baseball fan named Ezra Jacobson last winter researched the yearly difference between each league’s leader in bWAR and its MVP. Not surprisingly, he found the average had been shrinking for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the average difference between the AL MVP and the leader in bWAR was 2.1 and 3.04 WAR. In the 2010s, the difference had dwindled to 0.9. In the 2020s, it is 0.05.
Voters have become more informed and increasingly formulaic and uniform.
“I think the voting is massively improved from where it was,” said Anthony DiComo, who covers the New York Mets for MLB.com.
He added, “If you go into the way past, there’s quite a few in history where you can say, ‘Geez, they got it wrong. This guy should not have been MVP.’ And I don’t think that really happens that much anymore.”
WAR brought a framework for considering players in their totality. As a consequence, it has caused a generation of younger writers and voters to reframe the idea of value, separating it from team success. WAR has not just become a metric for determining value; it has become synonymous with the idea. The evolution probably helped pitchers Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw win MVP Awards in 2011 and 2014: The two led their leagues in WAR.
Anecdotally, it is nearly impossible to find an MVP voter who blindly submits a ballot copy-and-pasted from a WAR leaderboard. Rowley, of FanGraphs, and Forman, of Baseball Reference, emphasize WAR should be only a starting point.
If there is one significant difference in the voting process 30 years ago — beyond the information available — Stone, the Seattle sports writer, notes that it used to be “more of a solitary exercise, which meant you couldn’t be influenced.” Not only are the WAR leaderboards public and updated daily, but individual MVP ballots are publicly released on the internet.
“I do worry about groupthink,” he said.
“My argument,” DiComo, who covers the Mets, said, “is that we’ve gotten so good at measuring this, and voters tend to think about it more and more similarly. So it’s like, ‘Yeah, if there’s a small edge, in reality, there’s a big edge in voting, because everyone is seeing that small edge and voting for the guy who has it.’”
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