Quote:
Originally Posted by Dukie98
As bad as the George Bell MVP vote was, it wasn't quite as bad as the NL vote that year, with Andre Dawson's 4.0 WAR for a last-place Cubs team carrying the day.
Although Clemens won the Cy Young award, he was a complete afterthought in the MVP balloting - only 7 points. Paul Molitor had a tremendous all-around season, but missed 45 games for a sneaky-good Brewers team. The leading pitcher on the AL MVP ballot was ... Jeff Reardon and his 4.48 ERA (!).
https://www.baseball-reference.com/a...87.shtml#ALmvp |
NL guys: Eric Davis, Darryl Strawberry, Tim Raines, Tony Gwynn, Jack Clark, Dale Murphy, Mike Schmidt, Pedro Guerrero, Ozzie Smith, Bill Doran. That's ten position players in that order. I'm sure I could find pitchers (Nolan "Hard Luck" Ryan, Mike Scott, Bob Welch, Orel Hershiser, Rick Reuschel) that would knock some of the back end guys out, but Dawson is really nowhere in sight.
AL guys: Wade Boggs, Alan Trammell, Paul Molitor, Dwight Evans, Mark McGwire, George Bell, Kevin Seitzer, Darrell Evans, Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson. Like I said above, I could find some pitchers to knock some back end guys out (Roger Clemens, Frank Viola, Teddy Higuera, Jimmy Key, Bret Saberhagen etc), but those are my top ten position player guys. Bell really isn't that egregious. At least he deserved consideration. He's not really in the same area code as the top three, and I think he's also below Dewey, but he's right there with McGwire for me.
Three things: 1) I'm not really a big standings guy. I figure if you had poopy players around you, that isn't really your fault. The fault lies with your front office/injuries/luck etc. 2) I'm not really big on games played either. I figure a player's already being punished for missing time because the time missed doesn't allow him to make a stronger case, so why should I punish him again? I realize that the player that replaces him will definitely not be as good as him, but how close they are varies wildly, so I'm not going to punish him twice. 3) Gawd, the BoSox must have had some pretty poopy players outside of Boggs, Evans, and Clemens. How do you only win 78 games with those three on your roster, along with Bruce Hurst and Mike Greenwell? Yeesh! The only explanation is twenty roster spots worth of deadweight.