The last time a pitcher got serious consideration as a Most Valuable Player candidate was in 1999, when Boston's Pedro Martinez took second in the American League MVP voting. Pedro lost narrowly to Ivan Rodriguez of the Rangers and likely would have won the award had George King of the New York Post and La Velle Neal of the Twin Cities' Star Tribune not left him completely off their ballots.

"MVP is for everyday players," King was reported to have said to a colleague before the voting.

"I feel a pitcher should just not be an MVP," Neal said. "To win that award, it should be someone who's out there every day battling for his team."

This is the most common objection to awarding pitchers the MVP. How can a man who only plays one out of five games, and even then only plays seven innings, contribute as much to his team as the guys who play nine innings every day? This is not an outrageous argument -- it is common in sports for players at certain positions to be considered more valuable than players at other positions. In football, for example, no matter how well a punter or a long snapper plays, he can't help his team as much as a quarterback or a running back, which is why players at those positions have monopolized the NFL's MVP award and college football's Heisman Trophy.

La Velle Neal and George King and their brethren in the no-pitchers-for-MVP camp seem to think that pitchers are role-players. They are important to a team's success, like a good defensive center or three-point shooter in basketball, but ultimately they contribute less to help their teams win than the position players who play every day and swing the bats that put the runs on the scoreboard.

I disagree. A pitcher might not play every day, but on the day that he does play, he is easily the most important player on his team. Each position player can only come to the plate one out of nine times and field the balls that come his way, but the pitcher is involved in every defensive play and bears most of the responsibility for preventing runs from scoring.

Do these extra responsibilities make up for a pitcher's lack of playing time? Let's examine some numbers and find out. In 1999, Pedro Martinez posted a 2.07 ERA over 213-1/3 innings pitched. (His record was 23-4, if you're the sort of person who cares about won-lost record.) The American League average ERA that year was 4.77. Now let's suppose that the Red Sox had replaced Pedro in 1999 with a perfectly average AL pitcher. Such a hypothetical pitcher would have allowed 2.70 more earned runs per nine innings than Pedro. Divide 2.70 by nine, and we see that our average pitcher would have allowed 0.30 more earned runs per inning than Pedro. Multiply 0.30 by the 213-1/3 innings that Pedro pitched, and we find that the average pitcher would have allowed 64.0 extra runs. Another way to state this is that Pedro prevented 64.0 more runs from scoring than an average pitcher in his league.

People who think very hard about such things estimate that a team wins one extra game for every 10 runs it scores or prevents from scoring. The Boston Red Sox, then, won six or seven more games than they would have won had they replaced Pedro with an average AL pitcher. How did this compare to the best position players of 1999? Based on much more complex calculations published in Total Baseball, 7th ed., Roberto Alomar helped the 1999 Indians win 6.2 games more than they would have won had they replaced him with an average AL second baseman, the highest such rating in the American League that year. Ivan Rodriguez, who actually won the MVP, was rated as helping the Rangers win 2.8 more games than an average AL catcher.

None of this means that Pedro was necessarily the American League MVP in 1999. I only intend to illustrate that which should be obvious anyway: pitching is important, a great pitcher can contribute as much to his team's success as a great position player, and no well-informed baseball writer has any business automatically striking pitchers from his MVP ballot.

I feel I should quickly dispense with the specious argument that pitchers should not be considered for MVP because they have their own award, the Cy Young. Yes, pitchers have their own award, but so what? Batters have the Hank Aaron Award, rookies have the Rookie of the Year Award, and relief pitchers have the Rolaids Relief Man Award (don't laugh -- they've been giving it out since 1976). But everyone knows that the MVP is the biggest award, given to the best player in the league, regardless of position. The Baseball Writers Association of America, which administers MVP voting, has stated publicly that all players are eligible for the MVP, including pitchers, both starters and relievers.

God, let's end this madness.

+posted by Lawrence @ 9/21/2003 01:54:00 AM