I'm not a proponent of voting for pitchers for MVP in baseball. While they can have a huge impact on the success or failure of a team during a particular game, modern pitchers typically have an impact on less than 20% of their teams' games. Even if they get 35 starts which is rare in the major leagues these days, that's still less than 25% of the games. I find it hard to believe that someone who plays less than 25% of the time is the Most Valuable Player. Bill James points out in Win Shares that most of the least deserving MVP winners in history have been pitchers. (Denis Eckersley, Guillermo Hernandez, Jim Konstanty)
I'm currently working on a longer essay/theory about MVP voting, but ScoJo inspired me to write this post about when I would advocate voting for a pitcher. He suggested:
"My prediction… 74-88 with Grienke winning 18 of the 74 games and the royals winning 24 of his starts. Grienke gets cy-young."
My initial reaction was that if Greinke got his wins up to 20 with that record he might be the MVP. Realistically, I think for a pitcher to win the MVP he has to demonstrate that without him the team would not be competitive. I think a minimum of 25% of the teams wins being credited to him is a place to start. Winning 20 games for a team that wins 100 is less impressive than winning 20 for a team that wins 80. An MVP pitcher makes his team a winner when no one else can. The best example of a pitcher who did deserve an MVP was Steve Carlton in 1972. He won 27 games for a team that won 59. The team went 29-12 in games he started and 30-75 in all other games. He did it with limited run support as the Phillies scored 3 or fewer runs in 23 of his starts. Without Carleton, this team would probably go down as the worst team in baseball history. He didn't give them a good season but every 4th game he made them great.
Is Greinke going to be able to duplicate this? Absolutely not. The Royals are a much better team than the Phillies are and Greinke isn't going to throw 30 complete games including 8 shutouts. But if the Royals win 80 games and Greinke wins 21-22 of them with 3-4 shoutouts and 200+ strikeouts he would probably deserve at least some consideration as MVP.
okay, three months later and grienke is still amazing. I doubt he's going to make cy young, no less MVP, but if there was any player, on any team that was more valuable than grienke (not just wins, but putting butts in the seats and selling merchandise) I'd like to see an argument. Zach won't get the cy young and it will be the biggest shun ever.
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