That said, I think Jeter’s having a great year. I own my own house (okay, I’ve got a mortgage), my mother doesn’t have a basement (but she does have two pleasant and airy guest bedrooms) and I choose to spend much of my time in my own basement when I get to be home. And I still think Mauer’s the MVP.

To me, there are 2 positions where if the guy hits like an All Star first baseman, they just deserve the MVP, no matter how good or how bad they field, no matter how good any competition at any other position. Those two are, of course, shortstop and catcher.

Mauer is having that kind of season. Put Mauer at first base on any team in the AL and that team instantly gets better offensively. Put him at first base on any team in baseball except St. Louis and that team gets better offensively. Put him at DH for any team in baseball and that team gets better offensively. And he’s playing catcher.

Jeter is not having that kind of season. Jeter’s raw numbers are not better than many first basemen. I give him total props for playing shortstop, for being the team captain on one of the most successful teams around, for being a smart if not brilliant player. He does all the little things well.

And so, civilly to Mr. Rosenthal, yes, Jeter’s a fine candidate for MVP. He is the best player (by stathead measurements, sOPS+) on the team with the best record in baseball. What’s more, he has never won an MVP and he has been a long and consistent winner for the Yankees, who I believe have the best WL record in the AL since Jeter came up. If Jeter gets a sympathy makeup vote because he’s old and deserves an MVP, I can understand it.

But Joe Mauer plays an ever harder position. Joe Mauer is leading the league in OBP and SP and OPS and OPS+ while playing the most difficult position. Catchers have the shortest shelf life of any defensive position. They have the worst best offensive seasons of any position (although third base, surprisingly, is in that mix). At no other position are you expected to be a tackling dummy, the first chest protector for the home plate umpire, or to even wear so much protective gear. They call that gear the tools of ignorance because, and lets face it, you have to be stupid to want to let all those foul balls bounce off you.

Mauer’s season is very close to the best season ever for a catcher. Sure, he has lots of games at DH. But so did Mike Piazza, the only catcher with (IMO) a better season during the DH era, and Piazza mostly only got to DH during interleague play. When you have a guy hitting this well, a smart AL manager give him lots of DH days off for the bruises, the jammed fingers, the aching knees, to get better.

If Mauer was putting up the numbers of any other year of his career, I’d say give the MVP to Jeter. Hate the Yankees (please!) but you have to admit that Jeter’s a great player having a great season at a time when really only one other player is clearly matching him. It’s a perfect time for the old veteran’s MVP, the Andre Dawson MVP, Robin Yount’s second MVP, Willie Stargell’s MVP. Give the beloved old timer an award for body of work.

In other seasons, I’d agree, even though so many great players never earned a body of work MVP. Mike Piazza, for one. Eddie Murray. Dave Winfield. Mel Ott. Hank Greenberg. But the really important thing to earning a body of work MVP is that nobody has a competing season for the ages. In 1979, when Pops and Hernandez split the MVP, I think the MVP was Dave Winfield. He led the league in OPS+, in TB, in IBB, in RBI. He won a GG playing a great RF, bringing far more defensive value to his team. But he was 12 years younger than Stargell, and wasn’t having a season for the ages, so Stargell and Hernandez split the award. Winfield never got one.

Mauer *is* having a season for the ages. A-Rod has had several of them as Jeter’s team mate, and yes, it sucks when you want an MVP but the guy playing to your right is clearly better than you are. So I say, tough luck, Derek; no MVP for you, or at least not this season. Better luck next year. I’d still vote you into the HOF, if I had a vote. But if this turns out to be the Adrian Beltre season in the panoply of Mauer’s career, and he doesn’t get another shot at MVP, it would be a travesty much bigger than Mattingly over Brett & Rickey or Walker over Piazza. Mauer has earned the MVP playing (roughly) 100 games behind the plate.

I hope this is civil enough for Ken Rosenthal.

The question wasn’t intended to challenge your argument (yet), but rather to ensure that we were working from a common vocabulary.

Guessing here: what you really want to support as a “voting standard” is that MVP candidates should be ranked not by performance, but by performance adjusted for team context.

In other words, we might be roughly trying to model the idea that a players performance was n% of the total value delivered to the team, and the most valuable player is the guy, not with the biggest percentage, but with the biggest net share.

That team context adjustment probably has two terms in it. One is simply a function of wins (10% of an 100-win team is more valuable than 10% of a 90-win team), and another is some sort of bonus for making the playoffs (9% of a 95-win team that makes the playoffs is more valuable than 10% of a 90-win team that doesn’t).

Note that I’m being deliberately vague about the nature of both the function and the bonus. There’s an implication above that the value of total wins is strictly increasing, but it ignores the question of how many wins are necessary before the delivered value ceases to be negative.

For some, their model has the win function completely flat @ zero, and all of the delivered value exists in the second term. The divisional structure puts some questions on you at that point, but it doesn’t create inconsistent answers.

What we’re really looking at here is a method of adjusting the value of the performance for the context in which it was delivered, and total wins is not the only available proxy for this.

Derek Jeter is OPS+’ing 127 this year. His career OPS+ is 121, which is essentially A-Rod’s worst OPS+.

Other people with a career OPS+ of 147: Willie McCovey, Edgar Martinez, Mike Schmidt, Jim Thome, Willie Stargell and Lance Berkman.

Other people with a career OPS+ of 121: Ron Cey, Dale Murphy, Troy Glaus and Cecil Cooper.

This isn’t about the 2009 MVP (I think Mauer should win), and it isn’t about who is more valuable generally, and it isn’t a discussion of defense/baserunning/etc. This is just to say, hey, A-Rod is a tremendous player, one of the best in baseball right now.

To me, the MVP should definitely be the best player on the best team, but there’s really no way to measure who the best player is. Stats just complicate things. I prefer an intangible like EFFORT. So my criteria is “who tries the hardest on the best team?” Jeter, Rivera…these guys barely even break a sweat they’re so smooth. Teixeira, he looks like he’s working hard, so maybe…

But, no, the choice is clear: A-Rod defines “effort.”

It takes a lot of effort to roll out of bed in the morning knowing you’re not even the best player on your team, much less in the universe, even though you get paid more than everyone else in baseball and the vast majority of humanoids on this planet. Cashing paychecks with a heavy heart is not easy.

It take similar effort to screen the ENTIRE public relations industry and find the absolute biggest idiots to “brand” you and assist you in “image engineering.” It’s easy to find bad ones, but not easy to find the absolute worst.

It takes effort to first earn a ubiquitous nickname, and then dozens of satiric variations on that nickname.

It takes even more effort to keep PEDs from somehow finding their way into your mouth so that you can once again be Almighty Baseball Zeus. Kind of like it takes effort for all of us not to rob convenient-stores in this crappy economy.

And it takes an insane amount of effort to look as good as A-Rod. C’mon, how many of you look that good? Zero. It takes even more effort to avoid making out with yourself EVERY time you pass a mirror looking that fly. I don’t look nearly as good as A-Rod, but I find myself french kissing my bathroom mirror at least a couple times a day.

Nobody gives us more of himself than A-Rod.

You Mauer-pimping simpletons (yeah, so the guy hits .370 while playing the most important position on the field very well…what’s the BIG DEAL about that? Good god, the Twins are like 20 games out in last place anyways, right?) need to ask yourselves one question:

Wouldn’t YOU trade Mauer for A-Rod?
Of course you would. EVERYONE would.

The choice is clear:
Call him what you’d like (A-Rod, May-Rod, A-Roid, Stray-Rod, A-Fraud, etc.), Alex Rodriguez is MVP.

The voting instructions as quoted in 148 say that only the value of a player to his team is to be considered, which means that looking at auxilliary considerations (along the lines of “saving baseball”) isn’t allowed.

As far as players on last place teams go – yeah, the team could have finished last without him. But last place teams seem to enjoy winning too, and they’d have won fewer games without this hypothetical MVP candidate.

I am sure there are instances where a player has been deemed most valuable to a given team and he wasn’t their best player. But it really doesn’t matter to the MVP argument I made.

Because the best player in the league is demonstrably not necessarily the most valuable player in the league. I’d make 2 arguments:

1. The MVP being on a last place team – no doubt MVP of THAT team but of the league? On what basis? Couldn’t that team have finished last without him? Yet that player could indeed be the best player in the league as was ARod.

2. The MVP could mean something else as well. For example, Cal Ripken was reputed to have “saved” baseball during the strike years thanks to his unflagging play. If that is even remotely valid, then assigning him the MVP at that time despite clearly not being the best player isn’t an unreasonable approach.

As for who is MVP of the Yankees this year, it seems clear that it is Jeter for his performance and for being there all year etc. Bogus cherry picking of stats (like how well a team did with or without a given player) is nonsensical. There are way too many variables to assign a team’s record during any point of a season to just one player.

Sure it may look like X was the key ingredient when a team goes 1-10 in his absence but what about other players slumps and the loss of a pitcher at the same time or that, say, a key closer wasn’t up to snuff at the time. Or the fact that they may have played the 2 hottest teams at the time?

Too many variables to ever make the argument that X was key because the team did poorly in a short time he was out.

Tex is always quite in April. His career line in March/April:

249/349/433