The Bill James Gold Mine 2009 began shipping last Tuesday. Bill did another fantastic job. I wanted to share with you one of the nuggets he wrote:
***
Four of the very best players in baseball in 2008 weren't serious contenders for the MVP Award or the Cy Young Award, because they split their seasons between the two leagues.
CC Sabathia, 17–10 with 251 strikeouts and a 2.70 ERA, didn't win the Cy Young Award in either league because he made 18 starts in one league and 17 in the other.
Mark Teixeira hit .308 with 33 homers, 97 walks, 121 RBI, 41 doubles and eye–popping glove work at first base, but wasn't a serious MVP candidate in either league because he split his time between the leagues.
Manny Ramirez hit .332 with 37 homers, 121 RBI (same as Teixeira), 87 walks and a .600 slugging percentage, but he, too, had one foot in each league.
And Jason Bay, while no one seems to have anything to say about him except that he is no Manny Ramirez, hit .286 with 35 doubles, 31 homers, 101 RBI, 111 runs scored, 81 walks, and 10–for–10 base stealing. A lot of guys have won MVP Awards doing less, but Bay, again, was a half–and–half.
Here's a question for you: In all of baseball history up to 2007, are there four players that good who were out of the awards picture for either league because they split their duty between the leagues? I'm not sure there are. I know for certain that if you took all of baseball history up until about 1990, you couldn't find four guys like that.
These split seasons have become more common in recent years, of course, because cross–league deadline trades have come into the game. Carlos Beltran in 2004 had a monster two–league season (38 homers, 42 stolen bases), and Randy Johnson in 1998 struck out 329 batters in the two leagues. Still. . .four in one season is, I am pretty sure, unprecedented.
Do we need an award for these guys? They're MVP candidates, after all; they merely need legal standing. Are there going to be four of these guys every year, from now on, or was it a one–year aberration?
I don't know. I just hadn't heard anybody talk about it, so I thought I would.
***
Reprinted with permission from The Bill James Gold Mine 2009.