Sox’s Betts, Brewers’ Yelich win MVP awards
Commissioner Manfred, Fox television get new deals at owners meetings
Boston’s Mookie Betts and Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich were runaway winners of the Most Valuable Player awards after the 26-year-old outfielders each led their teams to first-place finishes with dominant seasons that included batting titles.
Betts received 28 first-place votes and 410 points from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in balloting announced Thursday.
Los Angeles Angels outfielder Mike Trout, a two-time MVP, followed with one first-place vote and 265 points. Trout tied the record of four second-place finishes shared by Stan Musial, Ted Williams and Albert Pujols. Trout won in 2014 and 2016; was finished second in ‘12, ‘13 and ‘15; and was fourth in 2017.
Cleveland third baseman Jose Ramirez was third with 208 points, and Red Sox designated hitter J.D. Martinez was next with one first and 198 points.
Betts hit a major league-leading .346 with 32 homers, 80 RBIs and 30 stolen bases as the leadoff hitter for the Red Sox, who won a team-record 108 games and their fourth World Series title in 15 seasons. Votes were submitted before the postseason.
Both batting champions won MVP awards for the first time since San Francisco’s Buster Posey and Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera in 2012.
Yelich got 29 first-place votes and 415 points, and the other first-place vote went to New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom, the NL Cy Young Award winner, who finished fifth. Chicago Cubs infielder Javier Baez was second with 250 points, followed by Colorado third baseman Nolan Boston’s Mookie Betts hit .346 with 32 homers, 80 RBIs and 30 stolen bases. Arenado with 203.
Acquired from the payroll-paring Miami Marlins about a month before spring training, the 26-year-old Yelich won the first batting title in Brewers history with a .326 average. He set career highs with 36 homers and 110 RBIs and had a 1.000 OPS.
Yelich nearly became the NL’s first Triple Crown winner since Joe Medwick in 1937, finishing two homers shy of Arenado and one RBI back of Baez. Yelich was especially impressive in the second half, hitting .367 with 25 homers and 67 RBIs — including 11 homers in August and 10 in September.
Milwaukee reached the playoffs for the first time in seven years, swept Colorado in the Division Series then lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a seven-game League Championship Series, falling one win short of its first World Series appearance since 2002.
Yelich gets a $100,000 bonus for winning, and the price of the 2022 team option in his contract increases by $1 million to $16 million. Owners meetings: Baseball owners have locked down their commissioner and their main broadcast partner, too. Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich hit .326 with 36 home runs and 110 RBIs.
Any decisions on speeding up the game and perhaps making it more enjoyable to watch will have to wait.
After wrapping up two days of meetings at a hotel next to the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park, the owners announced a new contract for Commissioner Rob Manfred, keeping him on the job at least through the 2024 regular season. The 60-year-old started a five-year term in January 2015.
“It seems like about 15 minutes ago I was spending a really dreadful day in a not-verynice hotel suite in Baltimore waiting to see if I could get vote number — what was I looking for, 23 right?” quipped Manfred, who won the vote to succeed Bud Selig in August 2014 after beating out two other contenders. “It seems almost impossible that four years have gone by.”
The owners also signed off on a new television deal with Fox, which still has three seasons to go on its current eight-year contract that pays baseball an average of $525 million per season.
The seven-year extension, which runs through 2028, will be worth just over $5 billion to MLB — roughly a 36 percent increase to an average of about $715 million per season.
Manfred was asked whether the owners had any reservations to making such a long-term commitment, especially giving the rapidly changing dynamics of the broadcast and online industries.
“I’m a huge believer in the idea that when you have a good partner, even when you’re looking at an uncertain landscape, that good partners find a way to navigate that uncertain landscape,” the commissioner said.
The relationship with Fox, which began in 1996, will continue to include the World Series and All-Star Game, as well as extensive playoff coverage on both the network and its all-sports cable channel, FS1.
The new agreement also commits Fox to showing more games from the League Championship Series on its main network, beginning in 2019. It was criticized for televising all but Game 2 in this year’s seven-game NLCS between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers on FS1, which has a narrower distribution. Starting next year, two of the first four games and Game 7 will be on Fox.
In addition to the extension with Fox, MLB also approved a $300 million, threeyear with DAZN, a subscription video streaming service run by former ESPN president John Skipper. Manfred called it a key part of baseball’s strategy to reach a new generation of fans.
DAZN will co-produce a nightly highlight show at the MLB Network in Secaucus, N.J., and do live cut-ins to games Monday through Friday, an arrangement that steers clear of national broadcast slots held by Fox and ESPN on the weekend.
“The owners have shown courage, because we are new,” Skipper said. “We will make sure that young fans have a whiparound show [similar to NFL’s Red Zone] that shows every home run, every highlight. We will get them interested in the game.”