Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander has had, by all accounts, a remarkable season. With the Triple Crown of American League pitching all but sewn up, Verlander has virtually guaranteed to himself the AL Cy Young Award in a landslide. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most outstanding pitcher in the American League this season.
But is he the Most Valuable Player? Furthermore, should a starting pitcher even be considered for the MVP, much less find himself in position to win it?
And how, if at all, would those arguments change if baseball had a more legitimate counterbalance to the Cy Young, a Most Outstanding Hitter award?
Don’t Know Much About History
Verlander’s candidacy has rekindled the decades-long debate about pitchers as MVPs. As the argument for him goes, Verlander is the sort of dominant pitcher who stops losing streaks cold in their tracks.
His 24 wins, or at least those that he would have earned above an average replacement, turned the AL Central race into a one-horse runaway for the Tigers. He has had a greater impact on Detroit’s success in 30 starts than any of his competitors have had in 600 or so at-bats across 162 games.
The argument against Verlander as the MVP? A) He doesn’t play every day, and, B) that’s what the Cy Young is for.
Suffice it to say, I don’t quite buy either one, much less both in tandem.
Nor do I believe that such “wisdom” is necessarily received or particularly dogmatic, as so many notions in baseball are.
Since the Cy Young Award came into being in 1956, there have been nine occasions in which one person has taken home both the Cy Young and the Kenesaw Mountain Landis (MVP) awards in the very same season. Seven of those guys were starting pitchers, with the other two being Rollie Fingers and Dennis Eckersley.
Granted, nine times out of a possible 99 opportunities doesn’t exactly make the occurrence of a pitcher winning the Cy Young and the MVP simultaneously a likely one, but it’s not as though we’ve never seen it happen.
And it’s not as though pitchers hadn’t won awards before the Cy Young came around.
Between 1931 and 1955, when the Baseball Writers Association of America voted on the MVP and before the institution of the Cy Young, baseball’s greatest honor was bestowed on pitchers 11 times in 50 opportunities, a mark bested only by outfielders, who claimed 12 MVPs within that same span.
Can Hank Still Wield His Hammer?
It would seem, then, that the Cy Young changed the way writers thought and still think about the MVP. Without the Cy Young, or with a comparable award for hitters only, would Verlander and his incredible season be so easily brushed aside as a non-entity in the MVP discussion simply because of the peculiar position he plays?
To the effect that the Cy Young is a pitcher’s consolation prize and the MVP belongs instead to a great everyday player with monster numbers, I offer this question: What about the Hank Aaron Award?
It’s perfectly understandable if you’re not familiar with this particular award because, to be honest, I really wasn’t either until I looked it up. I’ll let the description on MLB.com tell you what the Hank Aaron Award actually is:
“This coveted honor is awarded annually to the best overall offensive performer in both the American League and National League. Originally introduced in 1999 to honor the 25th anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, the Hank Aaron Award was the first major award to be introduced in 30 years.”
Whether the award is actually “coveted” is questionable.
Have you ever found yourself mixed up in a heated debate over who should win the Hank Aaron Award? Have you ever seen or heard any of the all-knowing talking heads blabber on about the Hank Aaron Award and why Player X should earn it over Players Y and Z?
Probably not, and you might say the reason for that is the “newness” of the award or that the MVP is essentially the same thing but much more prestigious, and you’d be right, at least in part.
Baseball lends itself to traditionalism and vague, unwritten rules set in stone somewhere next to the original Ten Commandments, wherever they may be, in part because it is such an old cultural institution.
Thus, how can an award just now approaching its Bar Mitzvah and named after a living legend whose career accomplishments have (technically) been surpassed possibly hold as much gravitas as a 56-year-old prize given out in honor of a dead guy whose records won’t ever be sniffed, much less approached?
A Recall at Baseball’s Ballot Box
Tough competition, to say the least, but there’s something else at play here, something else holding back the Hank Aaron Award from greater importance and, perhaps, pitchers like Verlander from taking home two awards at once.
That something is voting.
What separates the Cy Young and the MVP awards from the Hank Aaron Award, what elevates the former two above the latter one, is the simple fact that the Cy Young and the MVP are determined by the BBWAA while the Hank Aaron is currently awarded by way of a fan vote. The voting system for the Aaron Award has changed five times in 13 years.
Not unlike the Cy Young and the modern MVP, which both underwent significant changes in their methodologies early on, though the voting for those two has always been left to the BBWAA.
The credibility of any award in Major League Baseball ultimately hinges on the opinions of the sport’s writers. Ford C. Frick, the commissioner of baseball who instituted the Cy Young Award and had been a journalist himself, knew this full well.
Journalists are the gatekeepers of the establishment, the ones who laud baseball’s traditions and deride those who dare tread on hallowed ground or disrupt an otherwise fragile status quo.
Wasted Words
So what does that mean for the Hank Aaron Award? Why haven’t the writers necessarily given it their blessing?
Because they don’t vote on it. Why should baseball writers care about an award in whose distribution they have no say? Why should the writers bother publicizing the Hank Aaron Award with their words and their work when it’s not within their jurisdiction?
That’s not to say there’s any sort of intentional grudge being held here, that baseball writers necessarily despise and shun the Hank Aaron Award because of its vulgarity or its corporate sponsorship (it’s officially known as “Sharp presents the Hank Aaron Award”), though those factors certainly don’t help its case.
Nothing’s Written in Stone
The bigger question is: Would giving writers a say in who gets the Hank Aaron Award, either in part or in whole, change the way the honor is perceived?
Would that shift in polling make the Hank Aaron Award a worthy counterweight, something that baseball writers will ponder and pontificate about as profusely as they do the MVP and the Cy Young?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
There’s only one way to find out.
At the very least, a stronger Hank Aaron Award would, theoretically, put to bed, once and for all, the notion that hitters have the MVP and pitchers have the Cy Young and that one individual should not win both.
It wouldn’t guarantee that a pitcher of Verlander’s caliber would win the MVP, but it would at least remove a needless crutch from the conversation—one that yields only a circular justification when prompted—and allow for more stimulating and honest debate.
I can’t help but imagine that there are at least some voters out there who would be willing to cast their MVP ballots for Verlander if they knew that they could also hand a hefty piece of hardware to Jacoby Ellsbury, Curtis Granderson, Orlando Cabrera, Adrian Gonzalez, Jose Bautista or whomever else belongs in the discussion.
Adding to the Conversation
Now, I doubt that Major League Baseball, with the snail’s pace at which its infinite wisdom advances, would even think about surrendering the Hank Aaron Award to writers, much less consider the possibility in a serious light, though I could very well be wrong.
Perhaps, Bud Selig would switch the balloting for a sixth time and put more power in the hands of the BBWAA if its members prompted him.
I can only hope this sort of development happens soon, not for the sake of Verlander or the sake of the game, but for the sake of discussion.
Because, at the end of the day, what makes baseball America’s pastime are the endless and timeless debates that its history stirs up. Making Hank Aaron as worthwhile a mantelpiece as Cy Young would add positively to those never-ending discussions.
Verlander, in his own infinite wisdom, put it best:
“I’m just glad I’m able to mix it up a little and give people something to talk about, something to argue about. That’s what baseball’s about, isn’t it? Numbers and arguing and who should and who shouldn’t.”
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