LogFAQs > #909882758

All fair neon. It doesn't say pick the 10 best players. Maybe because "best" makes it sound too objective. I go back to no matter what you think the rules are or whatever , that it would just make more sense for the most prestigious award to be "best player". And yeah, it's all media anyway, its all opinion and thats fine. Theres never going to be a single metric that says "hey this is the best player", and its fun to have those debates to decide who you think IS better. I think the way the award currently works dilutes that a little (and that in general giving an award to the best player just feels more right).

And hey I mean, yeah he has a lot of the advanced metric leading stuff (he's the WAR leader- so was Kershaw when he won, but not enough to justify winning MVP), but he's also done very plain great stuff too. ERA is no advanced metric, I think most people would agree it's one of the easiest and effective ways to evaluate pitchers effectiveness. Obviously other stuff matters too, but standalone it tells you the most important thing about a pitcher- how good he is at preventing runs from scoring. deGrom posted a 1.70 ERA, which is Top 10 all-time since the 60s or so (and also basically since dead-ball). And I already mentioned the 29 consecutive starts of 3 runs or fewer, and 24 consecutive quality starts (I might've messed the numbers up before, I was generalizing, I checked to make sure I got the actual #s this time, lol) both of which are literally all-time MLB records. Those aren't just flavor of the month advanced metric type stuff. It's super impressive things that have literally never been done - and easy to see on paper (even if a "quality start" is a little tenuous... I'm not sure I agree 6IP 3ER should be "quality" but its not bad... 2 of deGrom's starts were 6IP 3ER. The rest of the QS were all legit "quality", but just going by what the stat is).

Like obviously that doesn't slam dunk make him MVP but when you have a top 10 season all-time in like, arguably the most important pitching stat, and set MLB records for pitching CONSISTENT pitching dominance.... that really lays the groundwork for an MVP case imo. deGrom's 3 ER or less stat on any other team makes him a 20 game winner pretty easily (for whoever that matters to) and obviously it does matter to one who thinks MVP needs, or generally needs to be on a winning team.

I wonder how much better he'd do if the Mets *were* a playoff team, deGrom won 20 games, and his only barrier to winning was the fact that he's a pitcher. And I'm more ok if you want to vote against him because of that as opposed the fact he was on a loser.
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