Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
November 15, 2004
Rolling a 7

Congratulations to Barry Bonds who won his 7th NL MVP award today. It was an easy win for Barry as he out pointed Adrian Beltre 407-311.

Bonds had 53 win shares this season, making him responsible for 17 of the Giants 91 wins, or nearly 1/5 of the team's total. Just how amazing is this? If you're lucky, a great player can make a five win difference in a team. That's replacing a below-average to average player. But Bonds Bonds is 8 wins better than Hideki Matsui, the AL left fielder with the most win shares (29)! If this were high school, Bonds would be the student who gets 100 on his chemistry test while the rest of the class gets 70's.

Until Barry Bonds, no one won more than 3 MVPs. There's a good reason for this. To be the most valuable player, an athlete should be at the top of his game. There is usually a very short window in which this happens, usually in a hitters late 20's. Bonds having the best part of his career at the end has of course drawn suspicions of steroid use. Whatever he's doing to stay in shape, he's produced the best four year run in the history of baseball.

He also could have easily won eight awards. In 1991, Bonds accumulated 10 more win shares than the winner, Terry Pendleton. He dominated the game when he was young, and he continues to dominate the game at age 40. If he can clear himself of the steroid suspicisions, he's staked his claim as the greatest hitter ever.

Update: You can see the complete voting here. It's impressive that Mark Lorretta finished fairly high, but it's as Brian Gunn commented below, Bobby Abreu did not draw much attention. The writers need to wake up to how good a player Bobby is.


Posted by David Pinto at 03:00 PM | Awards | TrackBack (1)
Comments

Great point about Bonds' longevity. I don't think there's anything he can do to clear his name, or at least the suspicions (although I wish he could). I don't know how he can prove a negative (if he tests clean, people will say he's either ahead of the tests, or was on something before).

Posted by: Mike at November 15, 2004 03:30 PM

Well, regardless of whether he's doing steroids or not, he still has a good eye for the ball, which is causing opposing teams to pitch him differently. Steroids doesn't have an affect on your batting eye, so regardless of his guilt or innocense, you've got to give him credit for that. A very deserving MVP winner.

Posted by: Jason at November 15, 2004 04:07 PM

Bonds is now in sole possession of second place for most MVP awards in any sport (behind Gretzky, who has 9). Bonds had been tied with Kareem (NBA) and Gordie Howe (NHL) at six all.

One other thing about the voting struck me -- Bobby Abreu, who was named to his first All-Star team this year, continues his reign as the most underrated player in baseball. He finished 5th in the league in Win Shares and 6th in VORP but only 25th in the voting. Does anyone in the mainstream media recognize what a great talent he is?

Posted by: Brian Gunn at November 15, 2004 04:15 PM

Seven MVPs is obviously a tremendous achievement, but when comparing it to the other pro leagues remember that baseball has two of them. Yet another example of why Gretzky is the greatest athlete in the history of North American team sports.

Posted by: Ron at November 15, 2004 04:54 PM

So are they going to wait until he retires to name it The Barry?
Steroids can help you hit the ball father, but they don't make you hit the ball truer. Bonds is locked in on the strike zone.

Posted by: Robert at November 15, 2004 07:41 PM

I will repeat this until people pay attention.
If he was on drugs:
1. He probably was not on "steroids"
2. He probably was on some sort of HGH.
3. They improve your vision, eyes are muscles, muscles
4. if your vision improves you see the ball and hit it better.

I think, actually, that lasik type eye surgery is the biggest change in the game, as now anyone can buy Ted Williams 20/10 vision.

Check out:
http://www.engr.utk.edu/~tsaleh/rant.html
for something I wrote to David a while back, edited minorly today.

Later

Tarik

Posted by: Tarik Saleh at November 16, 2004 12:52 AM

Abreau had a good year and is one of my favorite players but the Phillies were a disappointment and it's hard to gauge how valuable a player is to the teams success when the team doesn't have any success. I think the AL voting is going to be a travesty and completely ignore players who helped solidify teams and just go for power stats.

Posted by: Jack Tanner at November 16, 2004 08:30 AM

Abreu is a very good player. Yes, he is probably underrated, statistically. I live in the Philadelphia area so I catch a lot of Phils games and it seems to me that he gets a lot of his HR's when the Phils are way up or way down. The whole team seemed to work this way. I have no stats to back it up so I could be wrong but I certainly can't think of too many times this season when he was at bat at a crucial point of the game and delivered the "big hit."

Posted by: Craig at November 16, 2004 03:44 PM