MVP RACE A STUDY IN WHAT VALUABLE REALLY MEANS
Major League Baseball's Ohtani-or-judge debate a choice between bonkers seasons
They tell you in pundit school that it's important to take strong positions. No one wants to hear your carefully nuanced take on position X but maybe also position Y.
Which is a problem when it comes to the American League most valuable player race. Do you choose one historic, mind-bending season, or the other historic, mind-bending season?
Shohei Ohtani is having a year that is, technically speaking, bonkers.
Aaron Judge? Also bonkers. It's like choosing between Indiana Jones and Han Solo as greatest Harrison Ford role. Who can say?
Am I dating myself here? Yes, I am. Harry Styles is what we called Ford's wardrobe back in my day, dadgummit.
Anyway, the MVP thing was much easier last year, when Ohtani, finally fulfilling the promise of a true two-way star who could both hit and pitch, reduced the debate to the process of ticking one obvious box. He was the unanimous choice among voters.
Remarkably, the 28-year-old Japanese unicorn has been better this year.
As the designated hitter for the Los Angeles Angels, his power numbers have cooled slightly from his scorching 2021 season, but he's a top 5 hitter in the American League again in several key categories: slugging, extra base hits, OPS, and OPS+.
As a starting pitcher, meanwhile, he's taken a leap forward, which is, yes, bonkers. With a couple of weeks left in the season, Ohtani has pitched in more games, allowed fewer runs, and struck out a hilarious 196 batters to lead the American League in strikeouts per nine innings.
He hasn't been the AL'S best starting pitcher — that would be Houston's Justin Verlander — but he's easily in the top 5. Using the catch-all statistics of OPS+ and ERA+, which are adjusted for ballparks and where 100 is league average, Ohtani sat at
148 and 165 on Wednesday, fifth among AL hitters and fourth among pitchers.
Those numbers are better than the best hitter this season on the Toronto Blue Jays ( Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., 134) and also Toronto's best pitcher (Alek Manoah, 162).
You can play this game with many of the sport's stars and find that Ohtani is having a better offensive season than, say, New York Mets slugger Pete Alonso and a better pitching season than New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole.
Ohtani, just to underline the point here, is just one human, doing the job, at an elite level, of two players. There hasn't been anything like it for 100 years. He's Aaron Rodgers, if the NFL quarterback was also a standout defensive back (and not a burgeoning new-age weirdo.)
But, one player to whom Ohtani does not compare favourably on the offensive side is Judge.
The 30-year-old Yankees outfielder is destroying the AL this season with power numbers that might end up only exceeded by the sluggers of the steroid era.
Judge's OPS+ is 214, which since the end of the Second World War has only been rivalled by Mickey Mantle, Ted
Williams, various steroid cheats and Juan Soto in the two-month 2020 season.
His offensive production is so vastly superior to any other AL hitter that he would normally be a plainly obvious choice and this column would be about five words long: Aaron Judge is the MVP. Fin.
Except there is that niggling problem that often gets introduced at this time of year: What is “valuable” supposed to mean, exactly?
Ohtani's value is unlike that of any other player in baseball, simply by occupying one spot on a 26-man roster and doing the work of two people.
That would be true even if he were merely competent at one or the other of his gigs; that he is exceptional at both knocks the value scale a-kilter.
There's an argument to be made that as long as Ohtani is a dual-threat star no one else could possibly have the same value to his team.
Unless, that is, value is defined as “contributing to wins.”
Judge, his supporters will note righteously, is on a first-place team, even if it has swooned a little down the stretch. Take him off the Yankees and they might not even be in the wild-card race.
Ohtani's Angels are, technically speaking, hot garbage. After a 24-13 start they went a cool 40-70 to plummet out of anything approaching playoff contention. They are bad, and if you took Ohtani off the team, they would still be bad.
I don't think an MVP necessarily has to be on a good team and you only have to go all the way back to last year to find an example where the voters agreed. The Angels stunk last year, too, and Ohtani won anyway. (It's kind of a thing for the Angels, who also had two MVP years from Mike Trout when they lost more than they won.)
But as much as I see the cold logic of Ohtani's case, these awards also have some romance, and Judge just equalled the home run total of Babe bloody Ruth. He'll finish with the most home runs in a season outside the steroid era.
As remarkable as Ohtani is, I don't see how he competes with that.
As long as Ohtani plays like this, it will take an extraordinary season by someone else, a truly transcendent one, to make him not the MVP. Which is Aaron Judge in 2022.