Holliday edged out by Rollins

[Roxpert]

in the MVP voting. This is not a surprise to me, the way the voting has been going for the Rockies so far this offseason.

Very strange repeat of history. The last time in the playoffs, the Rockies were carried by their leftfielder who hit .340 with 40 HRs and 128 RBI, but that player finished second in the MVP voting to a dynamic shortstop. The parrallels between Holliday, who hit .340 with 36 HRs and 137 RBI, getting edged out by Rollins and Bichette losing out to Larkin are just plain spooky.

If anything, Holliday was MORE deserving of the award than Dante. He compiled his numbers in the humidor era, and carried his team down the stretch in September/October like few players have before. Just the East Coast bias, I guess.

[BigRapidsJackass]

That's right, Roxpert. Until the playoffs (post-voting), national exposure to Holliday was limited to the Home Run Derby thing.

The weird thing is that there's still a big bias against hitters who play at Coors, but no corresponding bias regarding hitters who play some of the new band box fields.

[Xitdax8]

Having Rollins be voted as NL MVP just makes me look at the MLB voters as big time hypocrites. The reason he got the award was because he hit well (albeit not as well as Holliday) but also because he made plays with his glove and plays the toughest position in baseball...

Hmmm. Okay, I'll take that. But if that's their reasoning, then why the HELL did Ryan Braun (a guy who had 26, yes 26 errors at third base) win over Tulowitzki for ROTY? What a load of crap.

[Roxpert]

Who said there was any intellectual honesty, or consistency, in voting for ROY or MVP? These are sportswriters after all, not the most brainy of citizens, and can't be held accountable for their woeful double standards. It's "mediocy run amok".

[BigRapidsJackass]

Tango at The Book blog thinks the Rollins MVP is perfectly justifiable. He looks at it from a Win Probability Added perspective. That's not how any Heltonfan type would ever evaluate performance, but think about it: it's called the Most Valuable Player award, and what better measure of how much value a player brought to his team? Unorthodox, but I agree that it is a justifiable approach. But really unorthodox, since he kind of mixes WPA for offensive performance with fairly standard defensive measures (that is, no attempt to divine context-dependent win probability added for defensive plays).

THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

And would you look at who's second on his list (above Holliday)?

Man, that Tulo had an amazing season. Every now and then I think, "What would the summer and fall of 2007 have been like without him?" One thing I know is this: we all would've stopped paying attention for good in July.

[Heltonfan]

Tango isn't wrong about many things, but he's absolutely, indisputably wrong about this. Judging a player by actual value, rather than context-neutral stats, is perfectly justifiable. But using WPA as the measure of value is absurd.

WPA thinks that a game-tying, ninth-inning HR, in a game that the team goes on to lose, is way more valuable than a first-inning HR in a 1-0 win. That's absolute nonsense.

If we're measuring past value, I care about two things, and two things only:
1) How responsible the player was for his team's wins
2) How responsible the player was for his team's losses
WPA doesn't measure either of those. It's a good stat for evaluating the significance of events in real-time, but for past value, it's simply not appropriate. If you want to really measure value, you need something like that Absolute Wins Produced metric I introduced on the old board last year (where wins and losses are divided among team members on a game-by-game basis).

In other words, when you're looking at past value, "clutch" doesn't mean performance in high-leverage situations, it means concentrating one's performance in 1) games the team won and 2) more specifically, close games the team won.

Incidentally, using this approach (I don't have the data for 2007; it takes far too long to compile), the MVP is almost always going to be a pitcher. Because no position player, no matter how good, is going to appear in 80% wins and 20% losses - individual hitters just don't have that kind of impact on a game-by-game basis. But pitchers can. If a pitcher throws a 1-0 shutout, he deserves something like 90% of the credit for the win.

And like MGL says in the comments, Tango's treating Rollins as a +20 defensive player is awfully far-fetched. UZR and ZR have him slightly below average.

I would have voted for Webb, with that vote subject to change if I ever put together the AWP data for everyone. But if I had to pick a position player, it'd be Holliday. Rollins isn't in the top five.

If anything, Holliday was MORE deserving of the award than Dante.

By far. Larkin was a better hitter and fielder than Rollins, and Holliday was a better fielder than Bichette.

[Roxpert]

Driving home today, I heard one stat on XM Radio in favor of Holliday. Apparently, he led the league in "RBI percentage"'. That is, Holliday drove in the highest percentage of runners on base. Is there any way to check that? I've never seen it published.