Every week, the Top Seven column will be enhanced by the newest addition to the JoeSportsFan Radio Network, Seven Minutes with Jason Major, where our Top Seven guru rants on the current topic, touches on previous lists and also vehemently defends his Cardinals bias...all in around seven minutes.
This week was a historic week for the Major League Baseball awards. It was not historic because two of the greatest players of our time—Joe Mauer and Albert Pujols—won the MVP.
It was historic because just one voter decided not to get cute and/or attempt to gain attention by voting for someone else who wasn’t the obvious MVP of the league. This year, Miguel Cabrera was the lone first-place vote who was not Pujols or Mauer, which is an absolute abomination.
Believe it or not, there are worse ones from this decade. One wonders if the Internet is the reason why there were less horrible votes this year than any other year—voters now know that they are going to get annihilated online if they vote the wrong way. This week’s Top Seven looks at the worst first place votes given out for MVPs this decade.
7. Andruw Jones, 2005
This is a perfect example of how voter infatuation with one statistic, in this case, home runs, can skew their thinking so much that they make an insane decision. Thirteen people voted for Jones in 2005 because he hit 51 home runs and led the league.
He hit .263 with a .347 OB%, and finished over 100 points behind Pujols in OPS. Here’s the craziest part—Derrek Lee absolutely crushed Jones in every other category, so much as you almost could make a case that he should have won MVP over Pujols, and Lee received precisely one first-place vote.
This, of course, leads to the other voter infatuation, team wins. In baseball, this is the worst argument of any of the sports. If your bullpen blows 30 games, is that your fault? What is the player supposed to do?
6. Alfonso Soriano, 2002
Unless “staring into the stands between every pitch and acting as disinterested as humanly possible” were a requirement for MVP, Soriano should never get a first place vote.
The Phillies played close to 1,500 innings in 2008. Lidge pitched 69-1/3 of them, or about five percent. It is simply not possible for someone to be the most valuable player in the league that only is a part of five percent of the playing time. It’s like a kicker getting MVP in the NFL.
Twelve people also voted for Lidge’s teammate, Ryan Howard, which leads me to an admission—the 2006 MVP vote is not as bad as I thought. I have long maintained that Howard-over-Pujols in 2006 is one of the worst ever.
I still believe it to be bad, and still believe Pujols should have won easily (due to defense and Pujols carrying the holy hell out of the Cards), but it’s not as big of a robbery as I have ranted about in the past. So there.
4. Johan Santana, 2006
But I can still complain about something related to the 2006 MVP! Life is good. Santana had one of the lowest finishes (seventh) of anyone who received a first place vote this decade, which should definitely count for something.
For reasons outlined with Lidge, I am in the “pitchers shouldn’t get the MVP” camp, though at least starters pitch more than five percent of their team’s innings. Santana threw about 15 percent of the Twins’ innings in 2006, and was absolutely ridiculous while doing so.
Still, an MVP vote when his teammate (Justin Morneau) won the league MVP in the same year? Not buying it.
3. Vladimir Guerrero, 2005
It would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between a guy winning one year and getting votes “just because” the next year. Terry Pendleton finished high on the 1992 NL MVP ballot after winning in ’91, when it was questionable as to why he was up there either year. Another example is Guerrero in ’05.
He had won the previous year and there was nothing wrong with that decision, but in ’05 he literally beat A-Rod in zero major categories, while playing in 21 fewer games, and someone still thought he deserved a first place vote. Did this person just mail in the previous season’s ballot?
Did they not even look at the stats? If they had a choice between taking $50 cash and a $500 check, would they choose the cash? How does this happen?
2. Sammy Sosa, 2001
First, remember that this is pre-steroids, so you can’t say that Sosa got votes over Bonds because of steroids. Secondly, even if it were because of steroids, said voters would not have voted for Sammy Sosa. With that in mind, two people thought that Sosa was the MVP over Bonds, who hit 73 freaking home runs and had a .515 OB%.
Bonds had him beat in everything except for RBI (Sosa had 23 more). The voters in mind couldn’t have even used the “team made the playoffs” crap either—neither team made it, and the Giants had two more wins than the Cubs.
An oft-used phrase with bad MVP votes is that “in 20 years, people will wonder what the writers were thinking.”
Well it’s only six years after 2003, and I have no possible idea how in the hell Shannon Stewart got FOUR first-place MVP votes. Granted, the votes were spread around this year more than any other this decade by far (ten players with first-place votes).
You even had a couple of the aforementioned “send in the previous year or year before’s ballot” votes with Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi.
But nothing is more random than Shannon Stewart—random because he led the league in nothing, random because he had 73 RBI all season, random because he had 13 home runs, and most random because THREE people voted for him.
This is the year where he was traded mid-season to the Twins, who made the playoffs, and it’s why three people voted for him. So they based their award for the entire season for a barely above-average player’s half-season with a different team? Makes total sense.
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