First of all, I’m not a professional writer who has an official vote in the election of the two MVP award winners. Like the rest of all baseball fans, I can’t formally decide who should win because every candidate has a strong case. As such, I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen between now and the announcement.
Maybe a clear-cut winner will finally emerge from the shadows in the dying moments of this season. Maybe there won’t and the writers will have to deliberate amongst themselves to come up with a winner. Or maybe there is no winner at all and the awards would be canceled kind of like how the 1994 season was canceled. However, for the sake of this piece, I will provide my predictions for the two people who will walk away as the new MVP award winners.
My AL MVP: Mookie Betts
My NL MVP: Jacob deGrom
Betts’ production is too much for anyone to ignore. The man has been on a tear. Yes, you have Trout with his talent and Snell with his meteoric rise to prominence, but right now, for this year, Betts has the better season. An all-around player deserves recognition, don’t they?
DeGrom’s victory is a no-brainer, in my opinion. No player, position player nor pitcher, has been able to touch him. Not even a little pinch. He has been in the zone throughout this year. However, there is a chance he may not actually win the award because of one tiny thing. The win-loss record.
Right now, in this day and age of analytics, wins and losses have been proved to be ineffective in measuring the worth of a pitcher’s skill. The record doesn’t make the man. And yet, writers—and don’t forget they are the voters for the MVP awards–who are stuck in the conventional side of baseball are still stuck in the belief that the win-loss record is important. Because of this, they may not vote for deGrom to win the MVP award or even the Cy Young.
Regardless, if there’s ever a time for the writers to name such a pitcher as the MVP thanks to his performance as a whole and not just his record, now is that time. Just do the right thing. Give him the award and everything will be alright.
I may or may not be right when all is said and done. Whatever happens, people will get mad. Go baseball.
