MLB needs all-encompassing playoff award
Baseball cherishes its history perhaps more than its happenings, embraces awards debates spanning months and occasionally years, and the last thing you’d imagine it needs is another trophy.
Yet there is a gaping void in the game’s honorifics, a prize to be had that better captures the most important month of the season than a World Series or League Championship Series MVP.
In short, baseball needs own Conn Smythe Trophy.
Sure, it seems odd to take a page from hockey, of all sports, but the seemingly endless Stanley Cup playoffs culminate in a cherished reward for the player who defined the previous eight weeks of play.
Baseball’s postseason is not similarly infinite, but perhaps you’ve noticed it only gets longer, which has positive and negative consequences.
Good: Nearly one month of playoff baseball is a significant on ramp for narrative development, for the emergence of unlikely characters, and provides a large enough sample to define the most important player beyond just a guy who got hot for a week.
Bad: The sheer tonnage – the 2013 and 2017 playoffs saw 38 games played – can’t help but dilute the impact of the World Series, the game’s jewel event.
Oh, the attention and intensity it creates is unmatched, even if every Fall Classic isn’t totally compelling. In the past five years, it’s safe to say three of them (2014, ’16 and ’17) were fantastic, with two five-game duds (2015, ’18) mixed in.
And too often, the World Series MVP is more the accidental tourist who ran into a few balls at key moments than the player who carried much more of the cargo through 12 to 20 games.
So let’s carve out a new reward – call it the Jeter-Ortiz Cup, honoring the two players whose postseason exploits have defined the wild-card era (if you its USA TODAY SPORTS
don’t think the numbers match the narrative, you can look ’em up).
Keep in mind, the Jeter-Ortiz won’t take anything away from anybody but rather provide an additional lens through which to view the postseason. Let’s take 2018, for instance.
Kudos to Steve Pearce, whose three home runs in World Series Games 4 and 5 quelled any hopes for the Dodgers and vaulted him, narrowly, over pitcher David Price for World Series MVP honors.
There were others, though, who better defined the playoff run for the greatest team in Red Sox history. J.D. Martinez began the dominant run of 11 wins in 14 games with a booming threerun homer against the Yankees in the AL Division Series and finished it with a home run off Clayton Kershaw, posting a .923 playoff OPS. Price shut down the Astros to finish the AL Championship Series and then pitched three times in the World Series, including a Game 5 victory two days after pitching in relief.
Hideki Matsui was the last Yankees’ World Series MVP, in 2009. Yet that championship run was defined by CC Sabathia leading a trio of Yankee starters through the playoffs on three days’ rest, as Sabathia posted a 1.98 ERA over five starts. He deserved some shine on that championship podium.
And if the World Series MVP and the Jeter-Ortiz Cup go to the same player, all the better.
Madison Bumgarner won the 2014 World Series MVP award, but that hardly captures a postseason that began with a fourhit throttling of the Pirates in the wild-card game. Over 29 remarkable days, he posted a 1.03 ERA in 522⁄3 innings, held opponents to a .188 average and capped it with that unforgettable five-inning relief appearance in Game 7, on two days of rest after tossing another shutout.
Give that man the World Series MVP, the J.O.C. and the thoroughbred of his choice to canter back to North Carolina.
The award would be a wise acknowledgment that modern playoff baseball is nothing like what came before it. It’s a month so vast that Kershaw can rack up two wins in the 2017 NLCS, follow up by throttling the Astros in a seven-inning, 11strikeout World Series Game 1 performance – and still get pilloried for his postseason performance after a poor start in Game 5.
Sandy Koufax is the standard Kershaw can never reach, but do you know how many career postseason starts Koufax made?
Seven – a total Kershaw nearly equaled in 2017 alone, when he started six games and relieved in World Series Game 7. Just a guess, but we might remember Koufax a bit differently if he had to navigate three rounds of playoffs.
So let’s get real and acknowledge that times have changed and that the World Series is no longer the singularly defining postseason moment. Better to reward both the marathon and the sprint.