Controversial pitching ace Trevor Bauer signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers last week, which was remarkable on a number of levels:
There are also caveats about the team deferring his 2021 salary if he opts out after this year, and the buyouts he'd receive if opting out ($2M for 2021, $15M after 2022), so he could effectively earn $85 million for two years' work, or $102M if he sticks around for all three.
Assuming he does well and enjoys himself in 2021, it's hard to imagine him turning down a guaranteed additional $47 million for one more year's work, but I guess you never know. I suppose if he's lousy in 2021 he's got even more reason to stay.
Bauer evidently does not care for long term commitments, stating that he prefers "flexibility" and not being despised by the fanbase when he's still earning huge piles of money even as his skills erode and he turns into a pitching machine in his late 30s. I'm paraphrasing here.
Of course, if he's lousy as soon as 2021 or 2022, he'll be plenty despised anyway.
Was He really That Good???
And make no mistake: There is a chance that he will in fact be lousy in 2021. Or at least that he'll be mediocre. That may sound like an odd claim when discussing the reigning NL Cy Young Award winner, but stick with me here:
Bauer won the 2020 NL CYA by going 5-4 with an NL-leading 1.73 ERA. He had 100 K's against only 17 walks in 73 innings pitched. He led the Senior Circuit in WHIP, Hits/9IP, adjusted ERA (5th best all-time and 3rd best since the Dead Ball Era), shutouts and complete games (2 each).
If you clicked on the ERA+ link above, then you may have noticed another name on that list: Shane Beiber, former teammate of Bauer's in Cleveland, who won the AL CYA in 2020 and whose adjusted ERA of 281 is 2nd since the Dead Ball Era, behind only Pedro Martinez' amazing Y2K campaign.
In fact, if you look at that list again, you'll see something very curious: Among the top 21 names/seasons on the list, four of them are from 2020. Most are all-time greats, though there are a few anomalies, specifically:
Keefe would eventually be elected to the Hall of Fame, even if he was just getting started in 1880. The other names are almost exclusively upper-echelon Hall of Famers: Greg Maddux, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Pedro Martinez each appear twice in the top 20, as does Roger Clemens. Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Pete Alexander, Three-Finger Brown and Keefe each show up once. Other seasons are ones for the ages, if not by eventual Cooperstown cronies: Doc Gooden in 1985 and Zach Greinke in 2015.
But then there are the four 2020 seasons, Bauer, Beiber, Dallas Keuchel and Yu Darvish. Darvish and Keuchel are both fine pitchers - Keuchel won the CYA a few years ago and Darvish is actually the all-time career leader in K/9, in case you didn't know (I didn't) - but neither of them is going to get a plaque in Cooperstown someday.
For that matter, if you look at the top 50 seasons all time in ERA+, there are five(!) of them from 2020, since Dinelson Lamet also makes the cut, tied at #39 with Greinke's Cy Young year of 2009. Only four other seasons appear twice on that list, and only one before 2020 appeared three times: That was 1997, when Pedro, The Big Unit and the Rocket all had incredible seasons at the same time. And we have our suspicions about how the 34-year old Clemens pulled that off...
Seems odd, right? We've got stats going back to 1876 - 146 years! - and 5 of the top 50 pitcher-seasons all come from this year? Are we in some kind of pitching renaissance?? Will we all one day tell our grandchildren how we once saw the great Dinelson Lamet pitch the same year as Trevor Bauer and Dallas Keuchel???? (Well, we didn't really see them, nobody did, since we were all stuck at home all year, but you know...)
Of course not.
Welcome to Small Sample Size Theatre!
These are all, or at least some of them must necessarily be, a mirage of the shortened season. Just like Keefe's truncated 1880 campaign, which has topped the list ever since there was a list of single-"season" adjusted ERA leaders, many of these appearances are here only because they were not forced to pitch a full season. Nobody started more than 13 games in 2020. Bauer started only 11. It was basically a third of a season, maybe a smidge more. As good as they are, it can be all but assured that, had they another ~20 starts to make in 2020, Some of those five pitchers would no longer have been on that list of the top 50 ERA+ seasons in MLB history. Lamet was an unaccomplished prospect working his way back from season-ending surgery. Keuchel had pitched to a cumulative 3.77 ERA in four years since he won the CYA. They certainly would have fallen back to the pack if given the chance.
Might Trevor Bauer have done so too??
Coming into 2020 Bauer had, shall we say, a checkered past. Entering the 2018 season he had a fairly pedestrian 4.36 ERA, equating to a 99 ERA+, in 728 innings across six MLB seasons, including the previous four as a rotation stalwart for Cleveland. It was a pretty good sample size, indicating that Bauer was a LAIM, but not much more.
Then in 2018, he seemed to have turned a corner. He was among the league leaders in Wins, ERA, strikeouts and a bunch of other stats when he got hit by a comebacker off Jose Abreu's bat in mid August and missed a month and change with a stress fracture in his leg. Upon his return he pitched only 9.1 innings across three games, as the team didn't want to risk reinjuring him since they had basically wrapped up their division in mid-August. Bauer pitched in relief in three postseason games, giving up three earned runs in four innings, including taking the Loss in the deciding Game 3 of the ALCS against Houston. (That was a Cleveland home game, so presumably Houston did not get any help from the rubbish receptacles.)
His 2019 season was more up and down. He pitched very well in April (5-2, 2.45 ERA) then in May, hmmm, not so much (1-5, 5.50, and also 7 unearned runs) . He was back to form in June (4-1, 3.06 ERA), was doing OK in July, and despite a few clunkers among his usual quality starts in those two months, was having a decent year. Coming into his last start in July, he had a 9-7 record and a 3.49 ERA, with 179 K's in 152 innings, including 15 Quality Starts in 23 outings. Pretty solid numbers, if not the type that win any awards.
But then, this happened:
And that bit of long-toss over the centerfield fence, as you may know, was the last pitch he would ever throw for Cleveland. This outburst, not to mention all the times he'd gotten into trouble on social media, and for berating fans who criticized him, gave Cleveland all the excuse it needed to rid itself of him. The Tribe suspended and then promptly traded him to the Reds (with the Padres) for Franmil Reyes and Yasiel Puig, among others.
Bauer had a few decent starts for Cincinnati down the stretch in 2019, but overall pitched to an ERA of 6.39 in a Reds uniform that year. They skipped his last start of the season against the lowly Pirates, who finished with 93 Losses and the 11th worst average runs scored per game.
2020 Hindsight:
Amazingly, in 2020 Bauer came back and pitched remarkably well, albeit in about a third of a full season. You would have to assume the law of averages might have brought his ERA back up closer to his career mark in the ~4 range if he'd had the rest of the season to pitch, though it presumably still would have been a good year.
Additionally, for the pitching he did accomplish, consider his competition. Remember, in 2020 there really was no "National League" and "American League", not until we got to the playoffs. The Reds played in the "Central Division" consisting of only the 10 AL & NL Central teams, and 9 of those 10 teams were among the dozen worst offenses in MLB by average Runs Scored/Game, the lone exception being the White Sox (5th best).
Among those 11 starts, Bauer had:
Alas, he did not get a chance to face his former team in Cleveland, who had the 6th worst run production in MLB last year. The only start he had in the regular season against a team that could actually hit was against the White Sox in September. He gave up two runs in seven innings and struck out five, but took the loss because the Reds had the third worst offense* in baseball last year by Runs/Game, and they scored no runs at all against the Pale Hose pitchers, including Keuchel.
* In terms of batting average, the 2020 Reds were one of the worst hitting teams in MLB history. The team's collective .212 batting average was the lowest for a "full season" by a team since the Dead Ball Era. And it gets worse, believe it or not: Because the The Great American Ballpark is a pretty good hitter's park, their overall offense was actually helped by it! They hit just .204 on the road with a .360 slugging percentage. They're like a whole team of Mike Zuninos.
The only teams who even come close to that hitting ineptitude since 1910 are generally expansion/relocation franchises or historical anomalies:
Again, Small Sample Size Theatre! 31 teams in all of MLB history have hit .220 or worse for the season - only 11 since the dawn of the 20th century - and four of them were this past year! So did Bauer and the others pitch so well because their competition couldn't hit? Or was their competition simply overmatched by the incredible talent of Bauer et. al? Chicken or egg...egg or chicken? I suspect we won't know until we get to see another full season of baseball this year.
Anyway, despite their historically anemic offense, by a quirk of the COVID schedule, the Reds managed to make the postseason. Bauer pitched well in the NLDS, allowing only 2 hits and no runs in 7 innings and change, with 12 K's. Unfortunately, the Reds lost 1-0 to the Braves in the 13th inning, and then got shut out again the next day, 5-0, becoming the only team in history not to score any runs at all in a postseason series.
So there are technically two data points from 2020 suggesting that Bauer can succeed against stiffer competition.
Moreover, before he got hurt in 2018, he had stretches of real brilliance. His last 11 starts before the Abreu comebacker consisted of a 7-1 record and 93 K's in 72 innings with a 1.62 ERA, numbers very similar to those he put up in 2020, and not very different from the rest of his 2018 season to that point. He pitched well that year against the Yankees, Astros, Twins, Rangers, Cubs and A's, all teams that could hit, in addition to beating up on the likes of the Royals and Tigers.
Deeper Down The Numbers Rabbit-Hole...
Bauer's Statcast and batted ball data for 2020 show some interesting things. He had the lowest line drive percentage of his career (17.8%, compared to 22% for his career) as well as the lowest pull percentage (35.4%, compared to 41.2% for his career). He also had the highest launch angle (20.9 degrees, well above his 13.4 degree career average) and the lowest ground ball percentage of his career, 0.72, way below his career mark of 1.12, which is odd, as you would think allowing a higher percentage of fly balls would have allowed more runs, not fewer, especially in that ballpark. His home run rate was right in line with his career marks.
He had the highest strikeout rate and lowest walk rate of his career, which makes some sense when you consider that he spent most of his time pitching against teams who couldn't hit. But more to the point of explaining how all those fly balls and line drives did not turn into runs, his batting average on balls in play (i.e. when he didn't allow a walk, homer or get a K) was a paltry .215, way below both his own career average of .294 and the MLB average of .292.
That .215 BABiP also happened to be the second best in the majors, behind only fellow "Central Division" opportunist Kenta Maeda, who clocked in at a .208 BABiP. Any guesses who Maeda faced the most? That's right: 3x each against Detroit and Cleveland, 2x against Milwaukee and once against Pittsburgh. He also faced the White Sox twice, allowing 2 earned runs in 5 innings each time. He finished 2nd in the AL Cy Young voting.
With Beiber, Bauer, Darvish and Maeda, the #1 and #2 spots in both the AL and NL Cy Young voting all pitched against the same (apparently) impotent competition. Both Beiber and Darvish had only two of their 12 starts against a team that was not in the bottom ~1/3 of the majors in run scoring, the White Sox, of course. Darvish allowed only one run in 14 innings, while Beiber allowed 4 runs in 11 total frames, getting a no-decision each time.
All Ahead Full-Impulse Bauer!
Dodger Stadium is still a pretty forgiving pitcher's park, so it could mask any failings on Bauer's part, at least as regards his pitching. But if he gets lit up on the road a few times (recall the hitter's parks he'll frequent in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and Houston) will we see the old Bauer's temper tantrums again? Will the fans hold back their ire in 2022 for a man making $47 million a year if he starts serving up longballs? Will he blow up at someone on Twitter again, alienate teammates or journalists, or otherwise make himself less than welcome during his tenure?
Probably. But if he can keep pitching like he did in 2020, nobody in Dodger Town will mind all that much. And if not, at worst he'll be gone before Joe Biden's term in office is over. Seems like a pretty good deal for both sides.
As I mentioned yesterday, the way MLB chose to set up its schedule for 2020 effectively means that there really was no true National League and American League. Normally it makes sense to have the Yankees competing for a playoff spot with the White Sox and the A's and other Junior Circuit teams because they are all in the same league, and face much of the same competition.
But with the 2020 rules, teams from the East, Central an West divisions in each league only faced each other and the corresponding division in the other league. The Giants are sitting home this October and watching the Astros - who had the same record against the same competition - advance a step closer to the World Series. The Twins had the best record among all the Central teams, and yet found themselves as a #3 seed, playing #6 seed Houston, which had a losing record. It would be like allowing the 103-win 1954 Yankees to face the 111-win Indians in the World Series because the New York Giants only won 97 games, against a completely separate slate of teams.
Anyway, the players, too, should be rewarded for leading their competition in whatever statistical categories they did. Mike Trout, for example, should now have his first home run title to go along with all the other amazing things he's done in his career, since his 17 homers led all players in the West this year. But alas, Luke Voit hit 22 (against all different teams and pitchers) so it's not to be.
Anyway, we covered most of that yesterday.
But what about the pitchers?
Yu Darvish led both the actual NL and the true Central with the same 8 Wins. Gerrit Cole led the East with 7 Wins, and Marco Gonzales of the Mariners and Zach Davies of the Brewers also both had 7 Win for the year, which led all comers in the West.
You may have known that Jacob DeGrom had another Cy Young-worthy year, and he indeed led the East in both ERA and strikeouts (but not Wins, because he still pitches for the Mets.) You may not realize, however, that the leader for the West is not Clayton Kershaw or some big name, perennial superstar, but a relative unknown. Dinelson Lamet, the Padres' pitcher who compiled a 10-13 record and a 4.37 ERA in parts of the 2017 and 2019 seasons - straddling a year-plus missed due to Tommy John surgery - led the West in ERA and strikeouts, though he went just 3-1. Heck, even DeGrom won four!
The Saves leaders were remarkable in that none of them ever led their leagues in Saves before. Kintzler had been a closer in the past, but had struggled since 2017 while bouncing from the Twins to the Nationals to the Cubs to now the Marlins. Brad Hand was the closer for the team that won the AL Central, and has been a pretty good closer for a number of years. Liam Hendricks anchored the A's bullpen as they were the only team in the AL West with a winning record.
And when you get to b/fWAR, again you see some familiar names: DeGrom, Lamet, Bieber, of course. But also Zac Gallen, who went just 3-2, but fanned 82 batters in 72 innings with a 2.75 ERA while pitching half his games in the thin, hot air of Arizona. Antonio Sentzatela ties Gallen for the lead in the West with 2.8 bWAR, which you might not guess from his decent-but-not-extravagant 5-3 record, 3.44 ERA and only 41 strikeouts in 73 innings.
Hyun Jin Ryu (5-2, 2.69) wasn't just the best starter on the Blue Jays staff, he was practically the only good starter for them until they traded for Taijuan Walker. And also he led all pitchers in the East in bWAR.
The Real Awards Winners:
If the annual awards were given based on the players' actual competition instead of their traditional leagues, these are who I think might deserve them:
DeGrom led the East in ERA, K's and fWAR. Beiber led the Central in the same, plus Wins AND bWAR, and will likely win the actual AL Cy Young Award. Dinelson Lamet led the West in ERA and K's, as we discussed, plus fWAR.
MVPs:
Freddie Freeman led the East in Runs scored, bWAR and fWAR. Bieber deserves all the accolades in the Central, though you couldn't go wrong giving the trophy to one of the Joses, Abreu or Ramirez. In the west, Mookie Betts was head and shoulders above the rest.
Rookie Pitchers:
In the East, the Braves' Ian Anderson went 3-2 with a 1.95 ERA in half a dozen starts, which normally would not be enough to garner consideration for an award like this, but this year, that was half the season.
In the West, Tony Gonsolin made eight starts and had a 2.31 ERA to go with his 2-2 record and 46 strikeouts in as many innings.
But the real story is Devin Williams, who only pitched 27 innings in relief, but he was amazing in all of them. He struck out more than half of all the batters he faced - 53 K's out of 100 batters - and had a 0.33 ERA, which is the lowest ERA in a season by a major league pitcher with at least 25 innings under his belt in over 110 years! (Someone named Earl Moore allowed zero earned runs in 26 innings for the Phillies in 1908.)
So there you have them, the leaders and awards if life were fair, which it is not.
This was a weird year.
In an effort to minimize travel, and thereby minimize potential exposure to COVID-19, Major League Baseball implemented an odd, 60-game schedule that allowed teams only to play the other four teams in its own division and the five teams in the corresponding geographical division in the opposite league. This means, for example, that the Yankees played both the Atlanta Braves and the Miami Marlins, but not the Tigers or the Indians, who are both obviously a lot closer, not to mention in their actual league.
Which sucks.
The decisions on who makes the playoffs are, in themselves, somewhat nonsensical. Here are the three actual in-practice regional quasi-leagues this season (East, Central and West) and how they stack up against each other. The teams in bold are the ones going to the actual playoffs.
Furthermore, the Giants had the exact same record as the Astros, against the same competition, but did not make the playoffs. Granted, their head to head records (Houston won two of three) would likely have given the advantage to the Astros anyway, but if MLB had chosen instead to take the best five teams from each region, plus one more to round out the 16 - which probably would have been more fair - then the Giants would have been in and the Brewers out. And the Phillies would still be watching the playoffs from their couches, as they should be.
As it is, in this reality, the teams will all play a three-game series, entirely at the home stadiums of the higher seeded teams in the first round. Then, if they get past that, they will play the ALDS and NLDS at neutral sites in California and Texas, as shown below. As a result, we have a playoff picture that is murkier that it has ever been, heading into the first day of competition.
Part of the reason for this format is that the shortened season and limited competition sort of inhibits our ability to tell how good a team is. Sure, Gerrit Cole seems to be the ace the Yankees signed for a bajillion dollars in the offseason, but he was 5-1 with a 1.69 ERA against teams that did not make the playoffs (Phils, Sawx, O's and Nats), and 2-2 with a 4.10 ERA against teams that did (the Braves, Rays and Jays). How would he have fared against the A's, or the Twins? We may never know, especially if the streaky Yankees can't advance past the first round.
But I was curious to see who would have led their respective "regional leagues", and more important perhaps, who might have "won" the awards if the players were being compared to their regional peers this year instead of to players they never faced until the postseason, or maybe not at all. I'll look at the position players today and will save the pitchers for tomorrow.
Position Players:
So here are your hitting leaders!
Luke Voit and DJ LeMahieu would still have their respective crowns, but Tim Anderson and Donovan Solano would also have won batting titles.
Interestingly, LeMahieu takes the title over Anderson in real life this year, the reverse of 2019, which marks the first time since 1956-57 that the same two players have finished #1 and #2 in the AL batting title race, albeit not in the same order each year.
At that time it was Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, and of course Mickey won the Triple Crown in 1956, including his only batting title and the first of his three MVPs. Williams hit .388 a year later and won the "slash line triple crown" (leading the AL in average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage) but finished 2nd in the MVP coting for the 4th time, each time losing to a Yankee (twice to DiMaggio, once to Mantle and once to Joe Gordon).
Good times! Anyway, back to 2020...
Manny Machado would have led the West in RBIs! Mike Trout in homers! In the Central, Jose Abreu would have two of the three triple crown pillars all to himself, instead of the just the AL RBI crown.
Donovan Solano seems to have followed the Gio Urshela path to becoming a major league regular. Both were signed as amateur free agents as teenagers from Colombia. Both bounced around multiple organizations for many years, primarily as a glove-first backup infielder. And both somehow just learned how to hit in their late 20s. Urshela famously filled in for the injured Miguel Andujar, and has hit .314 with 27 homers in 650 plate appearances the last two seasons, while remaining a plus defender at the hot corner. Solano, meanwhile, has hit .328 with 28 doubles and 7 homers in over 400 at-bats the last two seasons, and by rights should now have a batting title to his credit.
Jonathan Villar is also an interesting case: He was traded from the Marlins to the Blue Jays for a PTBNL in mid-season, and stole a total of 16 bases. (The Jays sent Griffin Conine to Miami to complete the trade, apparently having decided that having four sons of former MLB or international baseball stars on their roster was enough.) On paper it looks like Villar amassed fewer than 10 steals each in the AL and the NL, but in reality, he stole more bases than anybody he played against in the eastern "League". His 16 steals were one more than Trevor Story had, and yet Story has some black ink on his ledger, for leading the Senior Circuit, whereas Villar does not get credit for the second time he led his competition in steals (he had 62 in 2016 with Milwaukee, which easily led the NL).
I have also listed the Wins Above Replacement leaders from both Baseball Reference (bWAR) and Fangraphs (fWAR) as well as the position players who I thought might be considered the Rookie of the Year for each region. In this case, the bWAR and fWAR in two of the three regions both agree on Freeman and Betts. Mookie Betts leads both WAR types, both in the NL and in the "west" thanks largely to his stellar defense in addition to his excellent hitting and base running skills. Despite not leading the West in any of the individual stats (he hit .292 with 16 HR and 10 steals), he appears to have been the best overall player, in his or any division or league.
As for the Central, if the BBWAA were deciding they would probably give it to Abreu, who led middle America in both homers and RBI. But Jose Ramirez essentially carried the entire Cleveland offense, and played stellar defense at the hot corner to boot (or, you know, not to boot, which is what you're trying to do when you play third base), so I might give the MVP to him if I had the chance.
And Now for the Rookies...
EAST: Alec Bohm did not play the whole year but when the Phillies called him up, he hit .338 in 44 games with gap power (11 doubles, 4 HR) and didn't totally embarrass himself on defense. Only one MLB rookie with at least 160 at-bats has hit better than that in a season since Ichiro burst on the scene hitting and AL leading .350 in 2001. (Trea Turner hit .342 in 307 at-bats in 2016.) Maybe if the Phillies can upgrade some of that dumpster fire of a bullpen of theirs, they'll have something to build on next season. OK, probably not.
CENTRAL: Luis Robert hit just .233, but keep in mind that the major leagues as a whole hit just .245, the lowest mark since 1972 (.244), which was so terrible that half of the owners voted to implement the DH and old people have been whining about it ever since. Also keep in mind that Robert hit 11 homers and 8 doubles, stole 9 of 11 bases in just 202 at-bats, and played stellar defense in center field. Extrapolate that out to a full season and you're talking about a Gold Glove rookie knocking on the door of the 30-30 club.
WEST: Kyle Lewis is another rookie centerfielder, albeit not as good defensively as Robert. He also hit 11 homers, and hit .268 and took a walk more than once every other game, giving him the best OBP among rookies in the AL.
Tomorrow I'll look at the pitchers and see who I think should win the MVP and Cy Young awards for each region.
People sometimes talk about a team being "consistently inconsistent," meaning that they never seem to string together a winning (or losing) streak of more than a few games.
Hoo-boy...
I dunno if y'all heard about this one, but Fernando Tatis hit two homers! The second one when his team was already leading by quite a little piece! A lot of people were really upset about this, apparently. Fernando Tatis owes the pitcher an apology! The nerve! Hitting a grand slam - his second homer of the game! - when his team already had a significant lead! How *dare* he??
Oh, wait, No, not last night.
*This* game, from 1999.
In that game, Fernando Tatis SENIOR hit two homers, actually two grand slams, IN THE SAME INNING, both off Chan Ho Park of the Dodgers. In Sr.'s case, they had a 7-2 lead in the third inning - due largely to his first grand slam of the inning - and would go on to win 12-5. 
Actually, now that I think of it, nobody told him he should have laid down and coasted after that first homer. MLB actually celebrates it! Someone writes a story and shows the video every year on the anniversary. Sure, it was a smaller lead, earlier in the game, and he swung at a 3-2 pitch (his first one came on a 2-0 pitch), but still. The parallel is there at some level.
OK, it's weak, I admit, but I'm trying to make a point here:
Fernando Tatis The First had easily his best season in 1999. In January, his son was born, which was probably pretty exciting. After floundering with the Rangers for a couple of seasons, he'd been traded to the Cardinals at the deadline in 1998 and played well enough down the stretch and in spring training in 1999 to win the starting 3B job outright.
“I think there’s a lot of unwritten rules that are constantly being challenged in today’s game. I didn’t like it, personally. You’re up by seven in the eighth inning; it’s typically not a good time to swing 3-0. It’s kind of the way we were all raised in the game.”
Welp, here I am again, going down another JoePos rabbit hole...
Today's baseball-in-the-time -of-COVID essay details the inexplicable way in which Ted Williams managed to win his second Triple Crown in 1947 but lose the MVP by one point to Joe DiMaggio. Posnanski attributes it to the fact that the Yankees won their division by a dozen games and the writers did not often vote for players who were not on pennant winners or at least serious contenders in those days, not for first place in the MVP running, anyway.
He blames, perhaps rightly, the three first-place votes for the resurgent firstbaseman, George McQuinn, who had been released by the Philadelphia Athletics a year before but hit over .300 for the Yankees as they won the AL pennant running away. McQuinn was out of MLB a year later after hitting just .248, but in the mean time it looked an awful lot like McQuinn was the reason they won.
Personally, I thought the seven first place votes given to Yankees super-reliever Joe Page had more to do with it than that, but in any case, The Kid Lost and the Yankee Clipper won, and that was that.
However, this McQuinn "correlation = causality" argument reminds me of the 2003 AL MVP vote. Shannon Stewart got traded to the Twins for Bobby Kielty and a PTBNL at the All Star break. They were 44-49 at the time, but they went 46-23 in the second half, the best record in baseball. Stewart hit .322 with 6 homers and 38 RBI (2.6 bWAR), which made it seem like Stewart was the reason they were winning.
In reality, the team as a whole hit almost exactly as well in the second half (779 OPS) as they had in the first (768), even though Stewart himself was markedly better than the guy he largely replaced in the lineup, Bobby Kielty, had been. The lineup did average almost 5.4 runs per game after the break, compared to 4.6 before, but that must have been due to the timeliness of their hitting more than its overall quality.
In fact it was the pitching staff that got its act together in the second half, pitching to a 3.96 ERA, compared to the 4.74 they had racked up before the break. In particular Brad Radke and Kenny Rogers both pitched notably better, and Johan Santana just pitched more, as the Twins finally realized tat he should be starting every 5th day.
At around the same time, the White Sox traded for Carl Everett, another outfielder who really picked up his game after being traded. He hit .301 with 10 homers and 41 RBIs (2.0 bWAR) for the Pale Hose, and Chicago went 41-27 in the second half, after playing 5 games under .500 in the first half. Simultaneously, the first-place, 51-41 Royals (!) went back in the tank for the second half (32-38) and fell to third.
And for what it's worth, at around the same time the Blue Jays, who had traded Stewart away, also played better in the second half. Using the same logic, then, this would suggest that Stewart's absence was the reason the Jays started winning, which is only slightly more silly a suggestion than the previous one.
In any case, Everett didn't get a single MVP vote of any kind (nor, for that matter, did Bobby Kielty), while Stewart got three first place votes and finished 4th overall! So, what gives?
Well, there were two things at play here:
Admittedly, others made this argument as well (Mark Sheldon from MLB.com, Jim Souhan of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, who may have had a bit of a home bias) but none with as large an audience or as much clout in the world of baseball journalism as Stark. Stark has made something of a career of finding interesting looking numbers in baseball and writing about them, but of course just because they're interesting - or more to the point, just because they correlate with winning - does not necessarily mean they're meaningful or causal.
My favorite, which I learned about in Psychology I as a freshman at Lehigh, is the Superbowl indicator. From 1967-1997, the conference that won the SuperBowl correlated at 90% with the way the Dow Jones finished, though there is really no good causal explanation for this. My psych professor used it to remind us that correlation never implies causality, an expression he repeated so often that I can still hear his voice in my head as I type it out, now almost 27 years later.
Likewise, there is no more reason to believe that McQuinn deserved all the credit for the success of the 1947 Yankees than that Stewart deserved it for the 1997 Twins. Or that the Superbowl conference winner deserves credit for the stock market finishing up (or down). But it's an easy case to make, and harder to disprove when the optics seem to support it.
In 1947, nobody had the kind of audience that Stark did in 2003, but writers like Dick Young or Jimmy Cannon probably had wider readership than just about anybody else out there, writing for the New York papers, and may have advocated for McQuinn's votes with their fellow writers as well as their readers.
We'll probably never know, exactly. But it's interesting to consider how these decisions may have been made. None of them occurs in a vacuum, and the modern day decision makers (if indeed 2003 can even be considered "modern day" anymore) are not immune to the same kinds of flawed lines of logic.
Then Markakis settled into being, well, the sort that scouts will call "a professional ballplayer." They're all professionals, if you want to be technical about it, but Markakis was one of those guys who went out there every day and, without fanfare, without flash, without fail, just did his job. He hit around .300. You could count on him for 40-plus doubles and 20 or so homers. He played a solid outfield. One year he led the league in sacrifice flies.
Markakis was the kind of guy who would lead the league in sacrifice flies.
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