Joe Posnanski nails the conventional wisdom on Joe Mauer:
I felt so strongly that Mauer was the league’s MVP last year, that I voted for him … one of two people who did. It just seemed to me that a Gold Glove catcher who leads the league in hitting and is second in on-base percentage is a preposterously valuable player. Anyway, Mauer did not come especially close to winning last year either — seems like his relative lack of power has left most voters kind of numb and unimpressed. I’m not saying that Joe Mauer is under-appreciated, exactly. He has had a fan club for years … I just always thought the fan club was smaller than it should have been.
Yesterday I almost linked to an article where the gist was, “Now that Mauer is hitting for power, he’s the best player in the league.” The funniest thing about the piece was that Joe’s own manager, Ron Gardenhire still puts Morneau on a par with Mauer.
Over the last four years, Morneau’s WAR is 12.3, Mauer comes in at 17.5. I don’t think there’s any contest. If it takes Joe winning a home run title to convince people of his greatness, I’m all for it. It’s been there all along for anyone who wanted to notice.
Being Twins-obsessed, I’ve written quite a bit about this. It’s amazing that so many people, Twins fans included (or especially), still don’t get it…as I wrote the other day, “it’s not even close. They’re very nice complementary pieces, but Morneau is the Scottie Pippen to Mauer’s MJ.”
What you said. Morneau is more of a solid league-average 1b than anything else. He’s a good slugger, but there are a lot of good sluggers playing 1b in MLB. Mauer is unique and irreplaceable. There’s no real comparison between the two.