Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, but because he so happens to play for an otherwise lousy team, he is unlikely to win the American League MVP Award. Trout has led the American League in wins above replacement (WAR) in every one of his five big-league seasons, but if and when the 2016 hardware goes to some player with a better surrounding cast — Jose Altuve or Mookie Betts, probably — it will mark the fourth time in Trout’s five-season career in which he has not been named his league’s most valuable player after definitely being that.
By now you’re certainly familiar with this annual discussion: Many fans and apparently many MVP voters believe that “valuable” should refer only to players on good teams, as though mediocre clubs reap no value out of their players. It makes no sense: Trout may not be enough to carry the Angels to contention this season, but he alone is keeping the club from being one of the two or three worst teams in the Majors. People are presumably watching the Angels play, at this point in the season, only because they have Mike Trout on their team, and they’re buying up Mike Trout jerseys, too. His efforts this season won’t be enough to get the Angels to the postseason, but they still count. And while Altuve and Betts are both awesome players having awesome seasons, both of their teams would be slightly better right now if they had swapped their MVP candidate for Trout before the season.
This seems like just a fact of life more than something worth getting too worked up about: Mike Trout is always the best player, but Mike Trout won’t always win the award we give out to the best player. In the grand scheme of things, the MVP award is a frivolity, and its rewarding the wrong player sometimes is hardly a new phenomenon.
Mike Trout (Joe Nicholson/USA TODAY Sports)
But Trout’s particular set of circumstances still stands out: No player this good in several decades has ever been so frequently and so thoroughly jobbed in MVP campaigns. This is some gymnastic “math,” I recognize, and it’s tailored around Trump’s numbers, but follow along: In the last 30 seasons, players posted WARs of 9 or higher 30 times — once a year on average, but not every year. Of those, 19 came in a season in which the 9+ WAR player was the only one in his league*, and that player wound up the league MVP 63% of the time.
Seven times in the last 30 seasons, a guy rocked his league’s only 9-win season and didn’t come away with an MVP. It happened to Barry Bonds in 1996, Alex Rodriguez in 2000, Jason Giambi in 2001, Ichiro Suzuki in 2004, and Mike Trout in 2012, 2013 and 2015. It seems like it’ll happen again this year, meaning Trout alone will have been shorted the MVP award in singularly great seasons as many times as everyone else combined over the last three decades.
(USA TODAY Sports Images)
In 2012, when Miguel Cabrera took the MVP after his Triple Crown season and Trout — the superior all-around player — had to settle for a runner-up and a Rookie of the Year honor, I wrote, “if Trout turns out anything like as good as the historical precedents suggest, he should win plenty of MVP Awards by the time he’s through.” Based on everything we knew in 2012, I was spot on: Guys as good as Trout had not, to that point, often missed out on winning the award in seasons when they were the best players in their leagues.
Four seasons later, Trout is every bit “as good as the historical precedents suggest,” if not better, but he only has one award to show for it.
It doesn’t matter, of course, and it seems unlikely anyone’s about to change his or her mind about MVP voting trends at this point. But that doesn’t make them right: Just like in every other season of his big-league career, Trout is the American League’s most valuable player in 2016 regardless of whether he’s also the American League’s Most Valuable Player.
*- Though the stated criteria specifies this refers to seasons in which only one player had 9+ WAR, it’s worth noting that in 1996, both Ken Griffey and Alex Rodriguez posted 9+ WAR seasons and lost out on the MVP honors to Juan Gonzalez. Since Griffey and Rodriguez were teammates, it seems likely they cost each other votes, but that season’s balloting appears among the most egregious injustices in recent voting.
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