We’ve been discussing the concept of "value" in the Willie Stargell thread—to some, "value" means "quality" and to others it means "impact" and to others it means "leadership" and on and on, with all sorts of combinations of these concepts, and more, while to yet others the value in MVP seems so self-evident it’s not worth discussing. It’s a complicated subject on which there is surprisingly little accord, considering how long we’ve had MVP awards and much we’ve argued about them over the decades. You’d have thunk we would have come to some sort of general agreement as to what constitutes "value," but we’re still in the opening stages of such a discussion. What does it even mean to be "valuable," to say nothing of "most valuable"?

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do have some ideas I’d like to splatter against the nearest wall, the first being: Is "value" quantifiable? That is, if someone has vast statistical superiority is there some point at which he gets the MVP award, and deserves it? Imagine Johnny Statz has a huge year: he laps the league in OBP and SLG, drives in 30 more runs than anybody else, etc. and wins the Gold Glove at a key position. Is he the MVP, no questions asked? If we can quantify his contributions, using WAR or Win Shares or Anything You Like, is there a point at which his total number squelches all discussion? Is there a zone in which discussion becomes possible, and another zone in which it becomes mandatory?

What might disqualify Johnny Statz from the MVP? If his team finishes last in their division, is that a valid DQ point, or is that DQ simply punishing him for his teammates’ weaknesses? It could be argued that weak teammates bolster rather than undermine his case for MVP, since that means he can be pitched around and otherwise neutralized more easily than other MVP rivals.

How about if Johnny has a lousy personality? We all understand that a sunny disposition is said to be a positive factor in MVP awards, but should it be? There are at least two almost entirely separate "personality" issues: how someone comes off in public (to the press, and to fans, which may not coincide but often do) and how someone is said to behave behind closed locker-room doors. Thinking about the latter, aren’t we going on a rumor more than anything else if we try to gauge Johnny’s reputation based on what his teammates are willing to say publically about his private conduct? Is "Everyone here looks up to Johnny" necessarily the truth, or just a convenient way for teammates to avoid controversy?

Or look at the anti-Johnny, whom we can call Johnny Bassler, after that excellent performer in MVP voting who posted consistently mediocre stats. Bill wrote an essay about Bassler, where I think he made the case that contemporaries of Bassler saw something in him that we can’t find in the numbers, and you have to respect what they saw, even if we can’t make sense of it. The contrary view to Bill’s is: if Bassler’s contemporaries jumped off the Empire State Building, would you jump too? In the discussion of Willie Stargell’s qualifications for the 1979 MVP award, there is (at least) a minority view that Stargell won it (or half of it) as a lifetime achievement award, or as a subjective way to honor some Pirate other than Dave Parker, the 1978 MVP, or as an acknowledgement of the Pirates’ team spirit. ("Smells Like Team Spirit"?) In other words, in the view of some, Stargell won the MVP award but didn’t really deserve to: the voters goofed. They didn’t have sufficient data to work with that made their choice clear, and they made the wrong choice. If we are willing to allow for the possibility that 1979 voters made the wrong choice, then why not attribute that same possibility in assessing the voters who felt that Johnny Bassler deserved MVP support?

(Just to be clear, Bassler didn’t win an MVP award or even come within sniffing distance of it. I’m writing this from a Paris café, so no reference books available, but I think Bill’s point was that Bassler got some MVP votes for statistically undeserving numbers. On his worst day, Stargell was a much stronger candidate than Bassler was on his best day.)

Quite honestly, I don’t get the whole "respect for contemporary voters" thinking. Let’s suppose for a moment that the voters of the 1930s regarded, say, batting average as even more important than they did. Suppose that instead of considering it very, very important, as they did, they considered it to be the only important measure of offensive performance. Does this mean that we would have to respect their misguided thinking? Or may we decide that on the subject of batting average, MVP voters of the 1930s had their heads stuck up an anatomically improbable place? There are things that we feel we understand better than people in the 1930s or 1910s or 1970s did, and I don’t get giving respect for things I don’t understand.

It seems just as likely, or more likely, that Bassler benefited from some sort of favoritism than that he was a much, much better player than his numbers indicate. I can easily imagine a small group of sportswriters out drinking one night after a good game by Bassler and trying to top each other with "Oh, yeah? One time earlier this year, I saw Bassler have an even better game…." stories and that drunken night forming the bulk of his MVP support when the ballots were passed around. Or maybe he was just an exceptionally media-friendly sort of dude who helped the writers get their stories, who consistently pointed them in the right direction, was always available for a juicy quote…who knows? Certainly not I.  But to me the possibility remains wide open that Bassler’s MVP votes were just some sort of mistaken perception.

But let’s suppose that Bassler, or Stargell, had an exceptional record of key hits in clutch spots in important games. First off, I’d dispute that there are important games. There are games that seem important, there are games that are important in retrospect, there are even games that seem important at the time and turn out to have been important games, but we can’t escape from the fact that all victories count for one integer in the "W" column equally. If you hit a walk-off HR in an April game that takes place on the West Coast with virtually no TV audience on the East Coast that gets no play in the next day’s press because of some competing news story, isn’t that exactly as valuable as a walk-off HR that wins the pennant on the season’s final day with everyone on the planet tuned into the game? I know we think the second type of HR is far more dramatic, far more exciting, far more satisfying, far more memorable, but does any of this make it mean shit to a tree, as the poet says? If you hadn’t hit that April HR, the pennant-deciding HR in late September would be moot, because you’d finish one game behind where you are without it. Because we think something, does that make it so?

Here's an absurd hypothetical: your righty half of a platoon duo (i.e., one who starts 40-50 games per season) has his typical mediocre year, bats .260 with a little power, but his team is in the pennant race through the final week.  They win their final 3 games, and the pennant, on 3 walk-off pinch hits by this mediocrity, who plays a few innings of good defense as well throughout the final week. Does he deserve any support at all in the MVP voting?

How about if instead of the final week, he plays way over his head throughout September? He still ends up at his typical .260 BA, 10 HRs, sort of numbers but gets clutch hit after clutch hit in almost every victory in the final month.  He has a dozen teammates who put up better numbers over the course of the season, but he has a monster September.

This hypothetical hasn’t happened yet, and may not ever, but if it did, I suspect there would be those who would be angrily insisting that this zhlub was the MVP, that he singlehandedly won the pennant for his team.  If this guy would, over the course of his career, hit walk-off HRs and other clutch hits at precisely the average rate given his other statistics, but managed to bunch a disproportionate number of them into this one September, is that actually something we want to honor? Or are we mistaking the MVP award for the LSOBE award? (Luckiest Son Of a Bitch, Ever.) If we see something that is attributable to luck, or random chance, or a roll of the dice, and we know that on a rational level, are we obliged then to dismiss it? Or to honor it?

A pitcher who lucks out, and gets W after W, despite undistinguished pitching is perhaps a phenomenon that we now view differently (in large part thanks to Bill’s work putting Ws into perspective) than we did in the twentieth century. I used to refer to this phenomenon as the "Tim Tebow effect," though Tebow’s subsequent baseball career has rendered that reference murky: someone pulls out win after win for his team despite putting up terrible stats.  We don’t think much of "pitching to the score" any more, though we continue to recognize that it happens sometimes, positively and negatively. If a mediocre pitcher rattles off a 7-0 September by consistently winning games 5-4 and 4-3 and 10-5, are we inclined to respect him as a big game pitcher and an MVP candidate? Not in 2018, we’re not.

So why would we respect the screwed-up thinking of contemporary viewers in the 1930s who might have viewed him as Mr. Clutch? If I’m content thinking the voters of a decade I’ve lived through made a foolish decision, why am I prevented from contentedly thinking that way about voters from a decade I didn’t live through? We didn’t suddenly become idiots after I was born, did we?

Back to the subject of value: should money enter into the discussion? The way we normally use the word "value" relates directly to money. "Is this valuable?" or "What value would you place on this?" are questions that often have a numerical, dollars-and-cents answer: "Between $20,000 and $30,000, madame" or "That’s $3.87, mac" are reasonable answers to those sorts of questions. Should we consider salary when talking Most "Valuable" Player?

Is someone more valuable because he earns a low salary, and therefore allows his team to sign supporting players who make the team better? Does it enhance a young Albert Pujols’ contributions that he played very well and also presented the Cardinals with no significant addition to their operating budget during his first few years? There’s certainly a little logic to that position, and salary is surely a factor that we can know with considerable certainty (as opposed to "leadership" or "clutch").

But the opposite position is often heard: the most valuable player, in a monetary sense, is that player who is paid the most. A MLB team decides that A-Rod is worth 25 million per year, and A-Rod then puts up some monster numbers and validates the team’s appraisal of him as the best player in the game; isn’t that a clear affirmation of his value?

Such a muddily-defined discussion of "value" leads to a rejection of salary as a consideration in MVP thinking. Since we disagree on whether the highest salary or the lowest is a positive factor in the discussion, we tend to avoid the discussion altogether. But should we?  If there were two strong MVP candidates with almost identical stats and identical results (teams in different divisions, each finishing first with the same record, etc.) but one earned the league-minimum salary and the other was the highest-paid player in history, would that enter into your thinking? If so, which way?