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JV’s NumbersRecord: 24-5 ERA: 2.40* Games: 34 (34 starts) Complete games: 4 Innings pitched: 251* Strikeouts: 250* * League leader Justin Verlander Justin Verlander does not deserve to win the 2011 American League Most Valuable Player award.Before we delve into anti-Justin justification, some background.I’m fascinated by baseball and football statistics and the stories that can be found in such numbers. However, I don’t have the left-brained mental horsepower to truly grasp some of the complex analytics that delight the Sabremetricians the inscrutable Jesuit high priests of BABIP, WAR, OPS and VORP.I’m not a Luddite Neanderthal stained-sweatshirt Oscar Madison sportswriter who out-of-hand dismisses advanced analytics as nerd math from dorks who never played the game, and that gut instinct and simple numbers such as wins-losses are all that matter.Far from it, in fact. I’m a huge Moneyball fan and love using math, even arithmetic I can barely grasp, to prove a point.A college friend, Jeff Kim, has long been an advanced analytics devotee and is working on a book on the topic. He and I have had long running arguments on Facebook about baseball and numbers (I still insist Bob Feller is the greatest Indian, stats be damned), and I concede that I sometimes end up petulantly dismissing his clinical statistical-based argument as “a numbers fetish” while relying on emotion and instinct on my part. Of course, that’s pure frustration by my overworked mind.Baseball is a game of numbers. It’s also a game of metaphysical subtleties and emotion. But that doesn’t mean the numbers fetishists are wrong.With all the fawning over Verlander by some of Detroit’s courtier sportswriting community, I thought I’d ask Jeff (who’s not a Michigan resident or Tigers fan) for his unbiased analysis on Verlander’s worthiness of the AL MVP award, which is voted upon by the scribes of the Baseball Writers Association of America.I don’t have any particular bias one way or another toward Verlander or pitchers winning the MVP. This isn’t an attempt to be a controversy-sparking malcontent or an iconoclast seeking attention. I’m genuinely interested in what the statistics have to say and getting a prejudice-free analysis that’s something more than a drooling “Durrr! Verlander is really good! If he doesn’t get it, it’s because ESPN hates Detroit and loves Boston! Durrr!”Keep in mind, too, that the rules for the award don’t provide any guidelines for what constitutes “most valuable.”Jeff crunched the numbers and provided me with his thoughts (prior to Tuesday’s games) drafcentrum-wolvega , which I’ve pasted below as a guest commentary. He has me convinced. And Verlander’s accomplishments are not diminished if a positional player wins the MVP. He’s the most popular Justin not named Bieber or Timberlake in Detroit. He’s just not the most valuable player in baseball.Here’s Jeff’s take:Verlander for MVP?What makes Justin Verlander’s 2011 season particularly notable is the stinginess he has presented while tossing a high number of innings. While MVP voters are likely to focus on traditional wins and strikeouts, the two measures that need to be specifically noted is WHIP (walks hits divided by innings pitched) and outs recorded. Wins are team-created and supported; Bob Welch won 27 in 1990 and Steve Stone won 25 in 1980. How many of you actually believe they were even the best pitchers on their teams, much less the best in their leagues? That’s what I thought.Moving on: Verlander tossed 251 innings in 2011 with a WHIP of .920. Explained further, he has retired 753 of the 969 batters (77.71 percent) he has faced. That percentage is contextually excellent since American League pitchers will finish with an out percentage of about 70.4 percent, making Verlander a little about 10 percent better than the league in recording outs. No other starting pitcher in 2011 carries a rate that high, making Verlander as good a Cy Young Award candidate as anyone.However, the Most Valuable Player Award is a whole other matter, and while modern-day pitchers have won the MVP Award as recently as 1992, voters have caught on that pitchers simply don’t deserve their league’s top honor because they are not on the field enough to deserve it. Add to that the 1992 vote that gave Dennis Eckersley the MVP and Cy Young awards in a season in which he probably deserved neither; voters have become overly mindful of not repeating such a silly mistake.Still, let’s attempt to give Verlander the benefit of the doubt. After all, you could argue that he’s the best player on a division-winner that would have been hard-pressed to be a part of the post-season party without his heroics. That kind of if-then analysis is nonsensical since Jered Weaver, who had a similar impact to his Angels as Verlander had for the Tigers, is somehow less-deserving because his team fell short of a superior Rangers team, a team greater than any in the American League Central.To be fair, if Weaver wins the ERA title in front of Verlander, the support for Verlander’s MVP chances will likely drop like a rock. That sort of thinking is hogwash since ERA is partially determined by defensive ineptitude. Some of that is covered by unearned runs, but how many times do we see two-out bloops followed by a three-run blast? In this case, WHIP is a far better judge of ability and talent than ERA, and Verlander has the best WHIP.A bigger problem comes from proper crediting of wins, whether it’s Bill James’ Win Shares, Win Above Replacement (WAR), or some other analysis. In my personal analysis, seven-and-a-half created wins is a baseline for MVP-level consideration. That “consideration” is low since a player the caliber of Albert Pujols routinely created nine to ten wins per season during the last decade. The problem is that the modern starting pitcher does not even create a MVP-level threshold of wins. Period.Adding hitting and defense to his pitching, Roy Halladay, who enjoyed a brilliant 2010 campaign en route to the National League Cy Young Award, created approximately six-and-a-half wins, a win below what he needs to be considered a candidate. The NL MVP hermes replica , Joey Votto, created approximately nine wins in 2010. Those are the kinds of gulfs we see between elite everyday players and pitchers that toe the rubber once every fifth day. The last pitcher to even reach our benchmark is Pedro Martinez in 2000 with eight wins. The last hurler to deserve the MVP is Bob Gibson, with over ten wins, in 1968. So, why is there such a divide?The modern starting pitcher produces less today because they do less. Pitch counts are the norm, even with established hurlers. Some also endure a seasonal restriction of innings. There are more kinds of pitches that keep Drs. Jobe and Andrews with more business than they can ask for. You can blame Tony La Russa for the mass use of the one-inning closer. General managers now have to justify keeping middle relievers on the roster, so we now have one-batter specialists.These changes may actually have increased the value of pitching, but diminished the value of individual pitchers. You now see elite-level pitchers tossing 250 innings a year instead of the 350 we saw a half-century ago. Three hundred-fifty innings from a pitcher with a sub-2.50 ERA today would be enough to anoint him a MVP. Three hundred would make him a legitimate candidate. What about 250? Only a freakshow like Pedro Martinez, who registered a WHIP of .737 and had an out percentage of 79.68 percent would have a shot, and only if you didn’t have a player the caliber of Alex Rodriguez having a super year as well.So, we’re left with trying place Verlander within a historical context, seeing if his traditional numbers bear legitimate MVP notice. In trying to explain his value historically and rate his current MVP chances, we’ll use baselines of a sub-.950 WHIP and 240 innings pitched.Since the start of the organized baseball officially recognized by Major League Baseball in 1876, there have been 57 pitchers (excluding Verlander) that have pitched at least 240 innings with a sub-.950 WHIP. Fourteen of those seasons came before 1900 in an era when pitchers were completing every game they started and routinely throwing two to three times as many innings than their modern-day contemporaries. There was also no such thing as a Most Valuable Player Award in the nineteenth century. For the sake of talking about Verlander, those results are thrown out.We’re now left with 43 seasons by pitchers that have met our guidelines. Four of them (Walter Johnson in 1913, Sandy Koufax in 1963, and Bob Gibson and Denny McLain in 1968) have taken home their league’s MVP Award (9.3 percent). Of course, these are subjective awards but there’s no way on God’s green earth that Koufax was as valuable as Hank Aaron in ’63. McLain really wasn’t as valuable as Carl Yastrzemski or even his own battery-mate Bill Freehan in ’68. However, both led their teams to world championships while McLain additionally was credited with 31 wins, meaning that old-time sportswriters were going to vote for him even if he owned a 4.00 ERA.Since so many of these baseline seasons occurred at a time when pitchers were still tossing 300-400 innings, let’s look at life after the deadball era. Since 1920, there are only fifteen seasons that meet our criteria with three pitchers (Koufax, Gibson and McLain) winning MVP Awards. That makes 20 percent of our focus group, which appears to make Verlander’s chances of winning his MVP Award palpable.The problem is those three MVPs came at a time when conditions almost prejudicially favored pitching and defense capped off by the so-called Year of the Pitcher in ’68. Rules were changed after 1968, coinciding with the advent of divisional play in 1969 to make sure competitive balance would be restored and to get fannies back in the seats. Since divisional play began, only seven seasons meet our criteria and none of them are tied to a MVP Award. Here are those seven campaigns:YearNameTmLgWLERAGGSCGSHIPHRERBBSOHBBKWPWHIP1971Tom SeaverNYMNL20101.763635214286.33210615661289415.9461972Catfish HunterOAKAL2172.043837165295.33200746770191303.9141978Ron GuidryNYYAL2531.743535169273.67187615372248117.9461985John TudorSTLNL2181.9336361410275.00209685949169504.9381986Mike ScottHOUNL18102.22373775275.33182736872306203.9231997Pedro MartinezMONNL1781.903131134241.33158655167305913.9322004Randy JohnsonARINL16142.60353542245.671778871442901013.900None of the listed seasons were ever seriously mentioned in MVP discussions, mostly because none of them deserved it. In fact, only Tom Seaver in 1971 and Ron Guidry in 1978 managed to create as many as seven-and-a-half wins. Seaver wasn’t going win the NL MVP since Joe Torre was busy enjoying the best season of the decade by anyone not named Joe Morgan. Guidry was awesome and was the best player the Yankees had to offer in ’78, but Jim Rice produced 406 total bases and was an easy choice for that season’s AL MVP.Subjectively, Verlander compares well with Mike Scott’s 1986 Cy Young Award-winning season given their impact on their respective playoff teams. If you believe that Scott was snubbed of the MVP in ’86, then you’re likely to believe that Verlander deserves that honor this year. Jeff Kim If you haven’t figured it out by now, we’ve totally omitted Verlander’s biggest competition to this point. Toronto’s Jose Bautista has been the best hitter in the American League all season, leading the circuit in homers, on-base percentage, and slugging. For voters that place a high value on OPS, he may be an easy choice. The Yankees’ Curtis Granderson is the best player on the best team in the league, leading the circuit in runs scored and runs batted in while playing plus-level defense in centerfield.If you follow WAR, you’ll note that Verlander and Bautista each have a WAR of 8.5. I would caution belief in this since this is a league replacement-level by position. Remember that individual pitchers have diminished value in this era and that the replacement level for pitchers is lower than that of position players. This means that Bautista’s actual win-value is higher than Verlander’s.Something that bears mentioning: Starting pitchers on the day they pitch are the most important and most valuable players on the field. Period. That was the case in the deadball era and that is still the case now. However, can you really tell me that a player that appears in 34 games and completes just four of them is more important than a position player with an elite bat that plays in 150 games? On a production-per-game basis, no one this year is better than Verlander, but unless you can clone four more of him, he’s just not a MVP.My guess is that while Verlander has created approximately seven wins, Bautista and Granderson have each created somewhere in the neighborhood of nine wins and one of them (or Boston’s Jacoby Ellsbury) will be at the top of this list. There is no question that Verlander is the 2011 AL Cy Young Award winner with the only question being if it’ll come from a unanimous vote. But if you believe that Verlander is the AL MVP, then you’re being blinded by your allegiance of him and ignoring the facts, the truth, and history.Jeff Kim is a former NCAA Division I play-by-play announcer and sports-talk host, now an I.T. analyst currently working on improving the scope of baseball statistical analysis for fans and general managers alike.For more nerdy, iconoclastic malcontentism from Bill Shea, follow him on Twitter at @Bill_Shea19. 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