MLB Notes September 2nd

Another week down, another week closer to the playoffs, and your Orioles are showing no signs of fading, unlike me at 8pm. Let’s get to it.

Adley For MVP!

By the literal definition of the phrase I think you could make a strong argument for Adley Rutschman for AL MVP. Kinda sounds crazy, but go with me for a second. The Orioles were 16-24 when Rutschman was called up. They’re 69-61 now, which means they are 53-37 since Adley showed up. He literally took over from the worst catching group by WAR in baseball. With him, the O’s are now 11th. That plus what he’s actually done individually, both offensively and behind the plate makes for a good case, although admittedly not a winning one. Rutschman may yet have an MVP up his sleeve, but it’s not going to be in 2022. 

AL MVP

With about 30 games left in the season, I’m comfortable saying the 2022 AL MVP will go to one of two players: Aaron Judge of the Yankees or Shohei Ohtani of the Angels. Judge leads in both WAR measurements by about a win and has an OPS of 1.062. But, and I can’t stress this enough, Ohtani is also a great hitter AND he’s a great starting pitcher too! That’s insane! There’s not anyone else who has done this in the past 100 years. It’s literally unique in modern baseball and it shouldn’t be ignored, neither by you and I, nor by MVP voters. 

But like a baby with an old rattle, MVP voters get bored quickly and Ohtani won the award last season. Also the Angels are terrible and, whether or not they should, some voters have trouble voting for players on losing teams. Both those are going against Ohtani.

Then there’s the small matter of how good Judge has been. Silly high OPS notwithstanding, the highlight of Judge’s season is that he’s on pace to break the American League home run record of 61 homers in 1961 set by Roger Maris. Judge is sitting at 51 homers. His Yankees have 31 games remaining. If he continued on his season-long pace, he’d hit 12 more homers which would give him 63 on the year. You’d think that would be enough to engrave his name on the MVP trophy (thought, again, pitcher and hitter!). 

We’ll see how things shake out, but I’m guessing if Judge hits 60 the award is his. If he hits 59, Ohtani has a shot.

One player who doesn’t have a shot at the MVP this season is Mike Trout. Which is a very strange sentence to type. This is Trout’s 12th season and he’s been a top-five MVP finisher nine times. The three seasons when he wasn’t? One came when he played just 40 games as a 19-year-old. The second was last year when he played just 36 games due to injury but still put up an OPS of 1.090. And the third? This season, which hasn’t finished yet. 

Trout currently has a .954 OPS and a 165 OPS+, meaning his OPS is 65 percent above league average. If he finished there, that would be his worst OPS relative to the league since 2011. His This season, his WAR numbers are down a bit because he’s missed 40 games due to injury, but if he were to play the entire rest of the season at the pace he’s played so far in 2022, he’d finish with 7.6 WAR. Not Judgeian, but not bad. 

Are we ignoring Ohtani’s greatness?

Maybe “ignoring” isn’t quite the right word, but I think we’ve become somewhat numb to it. Last season he won the MVP in no small part because of the uniqueness of his skillset. The funny part is this season he’s been an even better pitcher in about the same number of innings. His hitting has been about as good as last season, relative to league average. He’s not going to hit 60 homers, but he could hit 40. And he already has 30. 

People talk about 20/20, which means hitting 20 homers and stealing 20 bases, but we don’t talk about 10/10, because nobody ever hits 10 homers and wins 10 games. Ohtani has though. Maybe we should talk about that. We probably don’t because who could conceive of such a thing as recently as five years ago? 

I’m not saying Ohtani deserves the MVP in perpetuity because he’s a unicorn, but I do think we should take note of how special and spectacular his last two seasons have been. We may have 10 more years of Ohtani doing this and then a bunch more by Ohtani copycats. We might be entering a new era of two-way players. But, 100 years of modern baseball tells us that’s unlikely. It tells us that Ohtani is the only one and there aren’t any more who can do what he does at the levels that he does. Remember, we’re talking about not just a player who can do both, but who does both at the top levels of the sport. The sheer brilliance of that shouldn’t be forgotten.

NL MVP

Let’s move on to the National League, where a bigger group is vying for the award. Right now Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt are the WAR leaders. Arenado has a narrow lead over Goldschmidt in both types of WAR, mostly because of the massive gap in defense between the two players. Goldschmidt has out-hit Arenado handedly, posting a National League-leading 190 wRC+ and a 194 OPS+, both better than Arenado’s 163 wRC+ and 167 OPS+. But Arenado is one of the best defensive players in the sport, while Goldschmidt is a well below average fielding first baseman. So it kinda comes down to what you prefer as a voter. 

Right now, those are the two top choices, but there’s also someone coming up from the pack in Mookie Betts. Betts has been on fire at the plate, posting an OPS over 1.100 over the last month, and over 1.700 over the past week. He’s also one of the best fielders in the sport and one of the best baserunners. And he’s the star on the best team in baseball. 

His play over the past month has pushed his WAR total to third in the NL, a half win behind Goldschmidt and a win behind Arenado according to FanGraphs. Baseball-Reference has Betts slightly further back, but only by 0.2 of a win. With the aforementioned 30 games left, Betts has ample time to catch and pass the two guys ahead of him in WAR, which he’ll certainly do if he keeps hitting like he has been. That alone won’t win him the award, but it’ll help make his case that much stronger. 

In truth, Betts isn’t the only one within striking distance. Manny Machado has put up an excellent season that has really saved the Padres bacon considering what Fernando Tatis Jr’s shenanigans have cost him and his team. Freddie Freeman and Francisco Lindor are further down the list, but strong closing months could help vault them into the discussion. The only other player worthy of mention is Austin Riley of the Braves. His batting line looks strikingly similar to Betts’ but he grades out significantly worse defensively, and as he plays the same position as Arenado, he’s more or less blocked from the award. 

More next week. Thanks for reading!